Why Your Business Needs A Continuous Improvement Plan

When business begin using Six Sigma, the goal is to eliminate defects from their current processes, thereby improving quality and effectiveness within the organization. A Six Sigma project is the effort to analyze the current process, determine what the cause of the defects is, and come up with the ideal solution to resolve the problem. This solution, ideally, should not be a quick fix, that takes care of the immediate problem, but it should be a long term solution that corrects the process for the foreseeable future. The best way to ensure this is to include a continuous improvement plan within the project. Why should your Six Sigma project contain a continuous improvement plan? Here are some reasons:

1. When you are examining a process, and trying to determine the ideal solution, you need to realize that this will be a continuous process. If you are only considering the current problems, and not considering future problems or improvements, then you will just be back in the same position in the not to distant future.

2. If you are going to be successful in business, one of the first things you have to understand is that things change. Success comes with being able to adapt to changes, whether they are planned changes or unexpected changes. A continuous improvement plan allows you to modify your processes as things change, without a considerable amount of work to implement these changes.

3. When you incorporate a continuous improvement plan, the purpose is to provide a reasonable way to modify your process, without having to invest in another Six Sigma project. Six Sigma projects are very expensive, and time consuming, and having to invest in another project, to re-evaluate the same process, is counter productive.

4. Improving a business is more about the future and less about the present. If a business cannot hold its own once the Six Sigma team leaves, there is an issue. It doesn't matter what a business does at first, but more importantly what they do last, when it comes to their improvement practices.

5. The priorities and focus of a business can change over time. When you incorporate a continuous improvement plan into your Six Sigma project it allows you to quickly make modifications to your processes, and helps to keep them aligned with the current priorities. Without a continuous improvement plan, your business may have to start a whole new Six Sigma project, just to make sure the processes are aligned with the new direction of the organization.

When you undertake a Six Sigma project you are trying to find a solution to the problems effecting your processes. This solution, ideally, should not be a quick fix, that takes care of the immediate problem, but it should be a long term solution that corrects the process for the foreseeable future. The best way to ensure this is to include a continuous improvement plan within the project. If you do not include a continuous improvement plan as part of your Six Sigma project, then you may have to go through the entire process again in the future, which is an unnecessary expense for your business. When you incorporate a continuous improvement plan into your Six Sigma project it allows you to quickly make modifications to your processes, and helps to keep them aligned with your current priorities.