A New Era of Manufacturing Continuous Improvement

Has your continuous improvement kept up with your business? It is a new era for manufacturing, and a new era for continuous improvement (CI) is available too. This eBook gives you ideas for how to update your CI with digital support and new approaches that ensure you build on your CI successes.

We interviewed manufacturers, consultants, and associations to validate and expand on the concepts we explain in this white paper.

Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research please visit our sponsor, PTC Thingworx (registration required)

Table of Contents

• Executive Overview
• New Era in Manufacturing
• The Problem-Solving Story
• Five New-Era CI Needs
• New Era in Manufacturing
• Expected and Engaging
• Distributed and Elevated
• Diverse Yet Harmonized
• Learning-focused and Digital
• Enabling CI Sequels
• Recommendations
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author

Executive Overview

There’s a new Era in Manufacturing; it is time for a new era of continuous improvement (CI). This is a time of digital approaches delivering an array of new capabilities and insights that can move the business beyond unpleasant trade-offs.

In this new era, CI gets enterprise-wide standardization and support and keeps the enthusiasm of local teams and employees. It delivers both local breakthroughs and views that support executives in understanding progress and prioritizing resources for the following CI projects in ways that make sense to everyone.

Appropriate digitalization enables CI teams to get rapid and reliable access to all the data they need from a wide variety of sources. Beyond that, it supports them in gaining rich insights from the data with far less effort than ever before.

Goals and results are translated into a shared, visceral unit of improvement that matters to shop floor operators, supervisors, managers, and executives: time. By feeding shared understanding, this digitally-supported CI will more likely generate enthusiasm and benefits even as the business shifts and changes.

The Problem-Solving Story

Path to Success

The Toyota Way points to a complete approach to solving problems – or making systemic improvements. The elements are:

• Developing a thorough understanding of the current situation and define the problem
• Complete a thorough root cause analysis
• Thoroughly consider alternative solutions while building consensus
• Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA)
  • Plan: Develop an action plan
  • Do: Implement solutions rapidly
  • Check: Verify the result
  • Act: Make necessary adjustments to solutions and action plan and determine future steps
• Reflect and learn from the process

Repeating this cycle over and over, daily and for more extensive programs is CI. This best practice has delivered excellent business results for Toyota and many other companies. The basics don’t need to change, but the nuances do.

Clearing the Path Ahead

Why must this CI story change?

Environment: For one thing, the manufacturing environment has changed. Uncertainty is rampant, so no system can rest on past successes nor be independent of other systems. CI must not only support the digital transformation but also be a part of it.

Momentum: For another, most companies have not fully succeeded in establishing this pure CI approach as a cultural and process norm. Thus, they reach a plateau and lose momentum. It’s not surprising. The CI system goes against fundamental human nature by placing people in an uncomfortable position: always looking for problems and obstacles, never resting or relaxing.

Trust: A new era in CI is intended to enable deeper insights than ever before. In the new era, unbiased prioritization and measurement of CI efforts are crucial. When everyone trusts both the process and data of all the company’s CI projects, the focus shifts to what’s best for all. A win-win attitude can prevail.

CI for CI: Finally, past approaches typically don’t ensure the CI process itself is improving. Many get stuck in the PDCA loop without exiting back to understand the situation and define the problem thoroughly. (Again, that is difficult and uncomfortable “upstream” work4.) One prominent need of CI for CI is to enable agility and assurance that all relevant data are included appropriately in the analysis processes.

Enabling CI Sequels

Each step of the CI story can benefit from having digital data available.

• Understanding: The complete set of correct data easily available and analyzed leads to a deeper understanding of the current situation and an accurate definition of the problem.
• RCA: Completing a thorough root cause analysis, such as tree diagramming, is faster and more assured when data is accessible, trusted, and complete.
• Modeling alternative solutions: When all parties trust and can see the data and its provenance, modeling to evaluate alternatives can be a clear and effective way to build consensus.
• Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA):
  • Plan: Developing and recording the action plan in an IT system enables all to see and contribute equally.
  • Do: Implementing solutions can come sooner when generating the plan is faster and the means to monitor progress is in place. The digital system can also help keep everyone in sync with rapid action.
  • Check: Evaluating is a data-based exercise, so having a coherent system designed to record progress and unintended consequences in an unbiased and automatic way can contribute to effective and efficient CI.
  • Act: Everyone can also participate fully and trust when they can see the basis for making necessary adjustments to solutions and the action plan

• Reflect: A consistent digital system can also facilitate learning from the process. People agree on the data and can use the system to record what they learned and what logic they used to direct future projects.

Using time as the standard unit of measure supports harmonization and comparison between different types of results and appeals to each person as something they understand and relate to in their own way.

*This summary is an abbreviated version of the research and does not contain the full content. For the full research, please visit our sponsor PTC Thingworx (registration required).

If you have difficulty obtaining a copy of the report, please contact us.