The Culture of Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is about shifting the focus from capital equipment to operational culture. After World War II, manufacturing responded to the need to ramp up production by buying equipment as quickly and with as much capacity as possible. Given that manufacturing is a system, mass ad hoc capital purchases created inefficiencies. Toyota was the first company to push back on the capital equipment approach and showed through lean manufacturing that there are better approaches to scaling than just buying capital equipment. This was the first appearance of continuous improvement, but similar non-capital approaches such as Six Sigma found ways to improve productivity, flexibility, and quality through focusing on coordination rather than equipment. Lean management has been credited with taking Toyota from obscurity to the top of the automotive industry in the last half of the 20th century. Competitors such as GM, Ford, and Chrysler were happy to copy specific tools in assuming they could replicate the Toyota success, but they were disappointed with their results. It is imperative for companies to understand their operations before beginning any good continuous improvement regime. There are two modes of failure for continuous improvement initiatives and the first is the mode where operations management staff’s knowledge is weak. The second failure mode in implementing continuous improvement is using the wrong metric in project selection.

• Continuous improvement, operations management, operational culture, manufacturing