In the face of today’s competitive and equally disruptive landscape, the continuous improvement of business operations and processes is a prerequisite for maintaining an advantage over your corporate peers. In as much as technology has become an important enabler and primary driver of Industry 4.0, the effective way of achieving successful improvements is to remain focused on your business requirements.
The ways in which organisations address these requirements can be twofold – reactively or proactively. This is largely dependent on the urgency of the opportunity, the capacity to address the improvement and the value-add it brings to the business.
Improvement techniques typically identify and align opportunities to organisations’ goals, and develop plans for improving business delivery through efficiency and effectiveness. The output of this promotes consistency, quality and increases the likelihood of success.
In our global economy, organisations are continually faced with a wide range of demands that need to be managed in order to maximise stakeholder value. Whether that is driven by the internal pressures of operational excellence and capital efficiency or the external pressures of regulation and direct competition, organisations need to focus on what really matters the most.
Organisations that apply a reactive approach to business improvement are invariably seen as responders to problems statements – seeking to understand the concern, performing root cause analysis and deploying remediation plans for correction and improvement. On the other hand, organisations with a proactive approach devise large-scale improvement programmes across their functions to provide better levels of assurance and ongoing optimisation. These programmes are usually supported by dedicated, in-house Business Improvement Offices.
Irrespective of being reactive or proactive in your mind-set, the golden thread to any successful improvement plan is having the executive leadership and management commitment. This allows for a transparent statement of why continuous improvement is necessary, and paints a clear vision of how the organisation will be different after the changes.
Improvement initiatives should be delivered upon sound implementation plans with comprehensive recommendations. With these initiatives further strengthened by assigning adequate resources with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, the likelihood of improvements to quality, timeliness and costs are heightened.
In conclusion, there is no silver bullet. Both approaches are equally effective, but the viable alternative ultimately comes down to the improvement efforts required in execution. The Six Sigma doctrine asserts that continuous efforts to achieve stable and predictable results are of vital importance to business success. In order to achieve sustained quality improvement, commitment from the entire organisation, particularly from senior management, is required.