Lean organizations look to minimize eight types of waste to create a flawless flow of value to the customer. In a perfect world, no resources are used until necessary, and every task contributes something for which customers are happy to pay.

In reality, achieving this is much more challenging than wanting it. That’s why Lean tools and techniques have been created to help leaders embark on this journey. Using software designed to support this type of positive change is one way to ensure success.

According to research generated by 3M, the company that brought you Post-it Notes, visual information is processed 60,000 times faster than text. Visionary leaders take advantage of the human mind's ability to process and remember visuals and leverage it to get more from all of the continuous improvement practices they manage.

Managers and supervisors can use visual management to support a culture of improvement and spread success across the organization. Opting for the digital approach makes it possible to deploy an improvement management system that makes visualization easy and available for every employee.

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.

We are fortunate to have the opportunity to talk to many people interested in implementing a software solution to help them amplify their continuous improvement efforts. Most of the time, they have never looked for such technology before, and they are not exactly sure how to get the rest of the organization on board with the approach. To help you overcome the most common challenges, we've put together this guide with tips on how to justify, evaluate, and implement a solution. 

The most common way organizations manage continuous improvement is with an assortment of improvement tools, spreadsheets, and email. We call this a "Franken-system."

A continuous improvement Franken-System can take many forms; you probably know them well. Perhaps you manage daily improvement with a physical Kaizen board that hangs on the wall. Maybe leaders get email updates when changes are made to the board. Do you take photos of the board so that a snapshot is captured? Are improvement tasks scheduled in a spreadsheet while project plans are kept in Word? Does every department have its approach? If so, you are certainly not alone.

The problem with this disconnected, chaotic approach to measuring improvement results is that there is no one vision of the truth. Spreadsheets are notoriously error-prone. Physical boards and assets like A3s and value stream maps are hard to share widely and don't inspire collaboration. Lack of standardization opens up improvement reporting to subjectivity and uncertainty. Data-driven leaders will doubt your results and possibly write off continuous improvement altogether.

We applaud any effort to collect employee ideas for improvement. These days with remote work becoming more popular (and often necessary due to COIVD-19), it makes sense that leaders are looking for online tools to accept worker suggestions for change. There are even free options that allow employees to offer ideas anonymously. Why not go for it?

While electronic suggestion boxes may be tempting at first glance, there are several reasons that they are not the best way to harness the creativity and potential for innovation from your team. 

Here are the biggest problems with online suggestion boxes:

Organizations that implement software designed to support, track, and align daily continuous improvement work gain big advantages over the competition. They can iterate faster, make smarter decisions, and engage more employees. If you are considering improvement software or trying to sell the idea to your team, this post is for you.

Here are the major benefits that improvement software provides.

We are often asked, “What types of businesses need continuous improvement software?” Our typical answer is that businesses in every industry, including manufacturing, healthcare, construction, financial services, engineering, and even higher education, benefit from improvement management software. That is the case, but the industry labels are only one element of what drives organizations to embrace improvement technology. The need for improvement is industry agnostic, but certain business conditions are signs software support can have an enormous impact.

Improvement software should be high on your list of initiatives to consider if you recognize any of the following:

Organizations that adopt the continuous improvement approach to business management have many tools and techniques at their disposal. Some organizations leverage these instruments as part of a structured business methodology such as Lean, Six Sigma, or Toyota Kata, while others take advantage of them independently. Improvement management software supports them all in various ways and creates a unified platform for all types of improvement work.

The Lean and Six Sigma business methodologies have deep roots in the automotive manufacturing sector. One of the reasons they are so popular in the auto industry is that they bring a set of techniques and tools designed to help organizations achieve continuous improvement and a seamless flow of value to the customer.

Fortunately for today's auto manufacturers, software is available to support Lean Six Sigma efforts and streamline the road to improvement and waste reduction. The best Lean Six Sigma software solutions for automobile manufacturers and suppliers have features to enhance multiple Lean Six Sigma techniques in a single platform that becomes the repository for all improvement knowledge and work.

Here are seven popular auto industry Lean Six Sigma tools that can be better supported by software.