Generate high people engagement to get everyone improving something important everyday
Continuous Improvement is not rocket science. It's actually just fundamentally good business management. Generate high people engagement to go a step beyond the bare minimum and do something good for the business everyday.
Incorporate Social tech to share ideas and best-practices
People generally like positive recognition. Just a simple pat on the back is a small reward – and fortunately for the rewarder – completely free to dole out generously. As the saying goes: what get’s rewarded, gets repeated. So logically, Impruver has incorporated a mechanism for recognizing, or rewarding, the behavior of improvement.
Each “success story” is automatically posted to the company’s Better Everyday Wall to stimulate a conversation around personal bests, best practices, and continuous performance improvement. From there, read about who is improving in what area and slap some “Hi 5’s” while you’re at it (similar to a “like” on Facebook).
Provide automatic notifications of successes
With Impruver, good news travels fast. Just log in and success stories from all around the business pop up on your screen, keeping you informed of recent highlights in performance. Here's how Impruver helps:
Better Everyday Wall
Success Stories are automatically posted to the Better Everyday Wall to stimulate the conversation around daily performance improvement.Track Root Cause corrective actions through to completion
Consistent growth and improvement doesn't just happen by luck. It takes deliberate action to constantly look for opportunities and work to capitalize on them. Impruver helps to drive these action in a systematic way, resulting in the gradual progression towards excellence.
There is a direct correlation between the pace of experimentation and the pace of improvement, as long as those experiments are aligned with the goals of the business. Impruver provides a seamless platform to drive the pace of experimentation that directly flows from the company strategy.
Users can launch problem-solving activities that result in detailed action plans based on potential root causes. This action plan essentially becomes your experimentation plan, from which learnings and mastery of the process are generated.
Ok, so far in the process, there hasn’t been much controversy…but here comes the challenge; getting the work done. This is where the rubber hits the road. Where you actually start impacting lives by making changes to the process; and of course, improvement is not possible without change.
The most brilliant action plans amount for nothing if the work flowing from it never gets done. This is arguably the most important element in Continuous Improvement because all results are generated here.
Impruver helps assign items, track status, key learnings, owner, and other elements of execution. The system also provides notifications for upcoming due dates and allows PDCA owners to validate that the work has been done satisfactorily. The fact of the matter is – if you’re not getting these things done, you’re not improving.
Power to the problem-solver!
In Impruver, the owner of the PDCA (or problem-solving activity) ensures the work gets done satisfactorily. Once the owner of a specific action item, resulting from the PDCA, marks the item as complete, the owner of the PDCA needs to verify completion of said action item and update the status accordingly. Then it’s a matter of observing the process to ensure that the intended result was achieved.
So what happens to the outcomes from all of this experimentation? What keeps you from having to repeat the exact same experiments year after year because no one remembers what happened last time it was tried?
Well, Impruver maintains a Learning Log of past experiments, results, and key learnings. This becomes somewhat of a virtual library that can be passed down to future generations of Impruvers.
Show improvement opportunity, or effectiveness, per person
One of the failings of traditional approaches to Continuous Improvement is to overemphasize the significance of processes, tools and equipment. Hence one of the most important metrics in CI is OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness). They tend to view the people as more of a expendable resource than the source of wealth for business growth.
Impruver places people as front and center in driving your manufacturing business toward success (notice the U in the center of the Impruver logo?). This is why we calculate effectiveness by person as well as by line, product, shift, etc. This allows the system to roll up effectiveness into the organization all the way to the CEO. For example, a Supervisor’s effectiveness is an aggregate of her direct employees’ results. An Ops Manager’s results are an aggregate of all his Supervisors’ results. This cycle continues all the way to the top.
This allows you to easily identify opportunities for benchmarking, coaching, and support in developing people to produce better results.
Testimonials
What are others saying about the impact Impruver is having on their manufacturing businesses?
Our operators now have the capability to fix the small things so that we can focus more on the plant's future.
Our plant folks are leading, our customers are happy, and our strategy is moving. Its a win-win-win.
My team now understands what they're supposed to be doing with all the data we have out there.
Whitepaper Anyone? How to Structure a CI Program for Maximum Impact
Learn what leading CPG companies are doing to generate incredible results through Continuous Improvement
