Ways To Improve Your Company’s Operations

(1) Incremental improvement: is the pursuit of improvements through a process of small, ongoing changes. This kind of improvement is associated with bottom-up, people driven continuous improvement. It is based on the belief that an organisation should never be satisfied, and should always seek to do better. Some of the techniques associated with incremental improvement include:

* quality circle-regular meetings of groups of workers to tackle quality problems and undertake improvement activities in their immediate work area. * Employee suggestion schemes- encouraging, recognising and rewarding employees for improving products and processes.

The continuous improvement approach suggests that employees have natural creativity that must be tapped into. It also acknowledges that the people who are closest to the organisation’s operating processes, the operation staff, generally know more about processes than anyone.

(2) Radical improvements: are designed to provide a one-off, major advance changes in design, operating processes and practices, and with big investments of money and other resources, and rely on the introduction of new technology. Top managers have a reliance on radical improvements to achieve performance improvements.

Radical improvement is likely to be effective when an organisation needs to completely change its performance to compete effectively or even just to survive. However it is often much more risky than continuous improvement, since it disrupts established ways of managing operations.

Before thinking about improving your company’s operations, you should be aware of what to improve in the first place. Whether you are a service organisation or you are running a manufacturing firm, there are two ways in which the performance of service delivery might be improved.

(1) Increased customer involvement Customer can become involved in designing the specification of the product/service, so that it can be customised to meet their particular needs and requirements (specification). Customers can also be used to perform some or all of the activities, such as service themselves from a restaurant (co-production). Customers become responsible for the quality of part of the operation, for example in assembling flat-pack furniture (quality control).

(2) Increased use of customer feedback to improve service quality Service operations need to understand quality from the customer’s standpoint, and to identify where operations do not meet customer expectations.

Tags: Business, Business Services, Company, Consulting, Continuous Improvement Process, Design, Employment, Management, Manufacturing, Quality Control And Tracking, Technology

This entry was posted on January 25, 2010 at January 25, 2010 and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.