As a company providing continuous improvement software to organizations of all sizes around the world in a wide variety of industries, we're in the unique position of seeing how successful companies manage improvement, how they engage their employees, and the impact they achieve through top-down projects, bottom-up improvements, and strategy deployment. 

When we ask people about the ROI of their continuous improvement programs, literally almost no one knows. Most people track their impact of improvement in some way or another, but the data is slippery and often subjective to the extent that they're not willing to stand behind those numbers.

Steve Howard, chief sustainability officer at Ikea said, “You should measure things you care about. If you’re not measuring, you don’t care and you don’t know.” Ouch. (I like this guy, he’s direct.) I suspect that most of us have things that we profess to care about, but that we don’t measure; most likely because we don’t know exactly what to measure or how to do it.

We find that in many organizations, continuous improvement is one of those things. Organizations will often make the effort to measure the results of each individual improvement, but they have no good way to gauge the success of improvement as a whole. They become so focused on an individual tree that they forget that there’s an entire forest standing right in front of them. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be that way. There are some continuous improvement metrics you can monitor to determine if a culture of improvement has taken hold.

Maybe Albert Einstein was talking about continuous improvement when he said, “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Too often, we see organizations struggling to measure only those things that can be tied to a dollar amount and they, unfortunately, neglect the impact of ALL improvements. Let’s have a look at the top six ways to measure the impact of your organization’s improvement efforts.

If you’re struggling to get a Kaizen culture to take root and thrive in your organization, you are not alone. We hear from people all the time in the same situation, and more often than not, they have no idea why the cultural transformation is failing. Equally common is the concern that Kaizen isn’t having the impact on the organization’s safety scores, satisfaction ratings, or bottom line that everyone thought it would. Here are some telling questions that we ask to help diagnose the problem so that Kaizen can move forward and create more of an impact in these organizations.

If you've been following along with our blog, you likely know that continuous improvement is a powerful tool for helping organizations meet increased consumer, financial, and legal demands. Most organizations include leadership in improvement initiatives - but a true continuous improvement organization involves everyone. By engaging every employee in a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, companies achieve increased quality, improved safety and satisfaction, and a significant ROI. 

Have you ever heard this parable? It’s a classic story about how one seemingly small problem, a missing nail, can have monumental impact - the loss of a kingdom.

Qorvo, one of our customers, uses this analogy in their continuous improvement work throughout the organization. Qorvo (pronounced kor-vo) is a recently merged company, combining TriQuint Semiconductor and RFMD, that produces wafers and semiconductor solutions used primarily in mobile devices, network infrastructure, and defense applications. Qorvo’s core technology helps connect the world.

Qorvo began their Lean journey in June of 2013, under the direction of a new VP, Gadi Dvir, who previously worked at Intel.

Dvir uses the nail analogy as a teaching tool to:

1. Emphasize the kinds of ideas that he wants his staff identifying and sharing
2. Promote the right attitude for leaders - to look at the opportunities for improvement (“nails”) as a vital part of the continuous improvement effort

George Mallory was an English mountaineer who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s. When asked by an interviewer why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he is reported to have replied, "Because it's there."

This may have been a good enough reason for Mallory to journey up the mountain, but is it compelling enough to sustain your business process improvement efforts? Likely not.

If you are looking to improve processes simply because you have processes, your initiative will quickly lose steam and support. Identifying the goals of process improvement and measuring results against those objectives is a crucial part of achieving a culture of improvement.