Flexibility is perhaps one of the essential qualities of successful companies in today's hyper-competitive environment. The ability to quickly adapt to changing marketing conditions and customer needs is crucial to modern companies' survival. Organizations with leaders and teams prepared to change when necessary can capture new opportunities, respond to threats, and impress customers.

Improvement management software prevents change from becoming chaos. Improvements to processes should be made thoughtfully, using a structured improvement cycle like PDSA or DMAIC. With improvement software in place, innovation becomes deliberate, and the process behind each improvement is transparent. Here are six ways that improvement software helps to promote sustained and purposeful innovation.

Most organizations don't have a single solution for addressing all business process hurdles. Even those that spend time and money managing months-long improvement projects often see only temporary results. 

The good news is that lasting business process improvement doesn't have to be complicated or require dedicated resources. Using the Kaizen method of continuous improvement, organizations can change slowly but steadily as they drive toward optimal processes.

Better yet, anyone from the CEO to frontline managers and staff can implement it.

If you are new to the idea of a structured approach to continuous improvement, this post is perfect for you. We will lay out the basics of some of the most common tools used to grease the skids for improvement efforts. We'll also include links to more complete content on each one, so you can dig in more to the ones that catch your attention. There are no rules about what tools you must use, and not every tool is right for the job, but this overview should help you get started finding out what will work best for your organization.

Right now, every business leader in America is doing something they’ve never done before—managing employees through a pandemic. COVID-19 has changed so much about how we live and work that you should not be hard on yourself if you are struggling to support your organization’s culture and to keep your employees engaged.

Employee engagement is essential for success, especially in this disrupted environment. Organizations with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable. They experience less turnover and absenteeism, and each worker is more productive. But how can you support engagement when remote work and physical distancing are required whenever possible?

Here are a few things to consider:

Even before the coronavirus outbreak (resources) changed the way that many people work, the move to online employee engagement and continuous improvement tools online was well underway. Remote work was popular well before it was mandatory, and there are a ton of benefits to cloud-based software. People can get to it from anywhere, the vendor takes responsibility for updates and maintenance, and users get instant access to new features.

When asked to describe his threshold test for obscenity in 1964, United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said, "… perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it."

I feel a bit that way about defining the improvement concept known as kaizen. There are many ways to describe it, and I will share some of them in this post, but because kaizen is a way of thinking, of being, really, it is easier to recognize than to delineate. I do not doubt that there are countless organizations and people that practice the principles of kaizen without having ever heard the word.

Hopefully, once you've read this post, you'll know more about what kaizen looks like and how you can apply the philosophy to your daily approach to work.

We are often asked, “What kind of businesses need a continuous process improvement platform?” Our standard answer is that organizations in every sector, including healthcare, construction, high tech, engineering, and higher education, benefit from improvement technology. And that’s true, but the industry is only part of the story. Improvement is essential for every type of organization, but there are certain conditions under which software support can have an enormous impact.

Organizations with Multiple Locations or Remote Workers

These days people frequently work remotely, and many organizations have multiple locations or job sites. One of the most significant benefits of improvement software is that it makes it possible for people to contribute to improvement and collaboration from wherever they are. Tools like physical huddle boards don’t work well for distributed workforces, but with process improvement software, they can be effectively used without the need to get everyone in the same place.

Over the last few years, the Lean business management approach has gained momentum across almost every industry. The methodology, which was once thought to be a niche tool for manufacturing companies, is now popular with healthcare organizations, construction companies, universities, and many other sectors. There are many ways to implement Lean, and it can be adapted to fit the needs of each organization.