Always be better! Business demands it!
Business operations are always expected to improve: regular productivity gains, constant decrease in waste and cost, risk reduction and control measures. Your production, operation and staffing plans adjust targets year over year – shouldn’t your environmental and waste reduction plans do the same?
In order to ensure continual improvement, you need to implement an ongoing program – not a one-time initiative. You’ll need clear metrics – which means you will want to benchmark the situation as it stands now. Having done that, you can determine where there is potential for gain, and target those areas for attention.
By prioritizing your goals, and focusing on the steps to get to each, you can realize gains in multiple areas simultaneously. And by constant monitoring, you are always aware of the status quo.
Training operations personnel in implementation is the obvious step, but it’s important to also include quality control, to allow for tweaking and maintaining gains.
Less obvious is management training – both in an overview, and to expose the business levers which allow control of results, and risks.
