Continuous improvement as a phrase or concept had been used in a wide range of business, management, organisational, even personal context. In a nutshell, continuous improvement refers to a never-ending effort to increase productivity by eliminating root causes of problems, reducing wastes, re-works, through replacement or re-engineering existing systems, processes and behaviours.
Kaizen is the Japanese word for continuous improvement, in literal terms, ‘kai ‘ means “change,” and ‘zen’ means “good” when combined with the principles of just-in-time (JIT), forms the foundation for lean manufacturing. Six Sigma process improvements developed by Motorola in the 1980s, is an offshoot of kaizen that is used in manufacturing to eliminate variation and by extension defects.
Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control) framework is a lightweight project based method to drive continuous improvements which has more similarity with kaizen.
I have used the DMAIC Six Sigma process improvement approach in the private, public sectors and, by far, the most crucial step is choosing the right project opportunities with the greatest impact that aligns with organisational strategy. Identifying and getting the right project sponsors, champions onboard early goes a long way to ensure the project success.
Once green light is in place, the first step is to establish project teams and steering groups, with cross functional staffs, departments heads to draft the project charter to serve as a roadmap. What you can not measure, you can’t improve. In the measurement phase of DMAIC, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter are identified to establish a baseline performance. In the Analysis phase, process bottle necks, root causes of problems and opportunities for improvements are identified to be implemented in the improve phase. The last phase of DMIAC is the control phase to installed control systems to drive performance, to ensure process improvements, are permanent, steps are in place to monitor, refine, and further improve the new processes.