Rationale

“Improvement is essential for an organization to maintain current levels of performance, to react to changes in its internal and external conditions and to create new opportunities..”

Explanation

In today’s global economy you have to fight to keep your position in the market, your competitors are always trying to find a way to be cheaper, quicker or better. You therefore have to stay ahead of them if you want to keep your position, fall behind and they will take your customers from you.

Every organization always will have a lot of opportunities for next improvement. Improvement must be promoted throughout the organization. The efficient implementation of this principle leads to cost saving, reducing of failures in products and services, or offer of new products, and elimination of internal non-effectiveness in the organization.

Improvement is one of the most important factors in staying in business where all of the other principles will help you to achieve continuous quality improvement in everything that you do. Continual improvement is perceived as proactively seeking opportunities to improve performance in everything you do and seeking better ways of doing things.

Applying the principle of Improvement typically leads to these actions;

• Employing a consistent organization-wide approach to improvement of the organization’s performance.
• Providing people with training in the methods and tools and ensuring people are competent ot successfully achieve improvement objectives.
• Making improvement of products, processes and systems an objective for every individual in the organization.
• Establishing the guide and process in order to plan, implement, measure, and track the results of improvement projects.
• Integrating improvement considerations into the development of new or modified goods, services and processes.
• Recognizing and acknowledging improvements.

The Key Benefits

• Improved process performance, organizational capabilities and customer satisfaction Enhanced focus on root-cause investigation and determination, followed by prevention and corrective actions
• Enhanced ability to anticipate and react to internal and external risks and opportunities
• Enhanced consideration of both incremental and breakthrough improvement
• Improved use of learning for improvement
• Enhanced drive for innovation

Check out the Quality Management Principle #6 in the next article ……

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