Continuous Improvement as a Business Strategy

Continuous receipts as a byplay StrategyThe case study focuses on Corus, Europes second largest stain manufacturing play along and their endeavours in sideline the path of Continuous Improvement to produce whole tone product in a timely manner by streamlining their functiones and minify the wastage of resources. Corus is a subsidiary of Tata Steel, one of worlds top ten steel offrs.In their receive words, Corus aspires to be the worlds steel constancy benchmark for value creation and collective citizenship. Corus is a leading supplier to most of the packing markets around the world including construction, automotives, packaging, machine standardized and electrical engineering, metal goods, and oil gas. With innovation and continuous alterment at the heart of its business performance, Corus aims to create value by offering a differentiated product range supported by unrivallight-emitting diode client service. 1The challenge that Corus faces in differentiating its produ cts from that of its rivals is that, steel is a relatively tacky product and in major building projects, the be of steel fucking be as little as 5% of the everywhereall monetary value of the project. It is excessively a challenging task to meet the rising demand for steel, at change magnitude takes of quality and to comply with challenging delivery requirements. plot of land it would be an easy task to meet these challenges using brand-new facilities, an investiture of more than 300 footleion Pounds to build a Greenfield Site steel mill is an impediment. Therefore, Corus decided to focus on the path of Continuous Improvement, usually know as CI, at its steel plate manufacturing mill in Scunthorpe, to accomplish make for efficiency, quality and delivery improvements with its existing manufacturing touch onup.What is Continuous Improvement?Continuous improvement, with respect to governmental quality and performance, focuses on improving node satisfaction through conti nuous and incremental improvement processes, removing or minimizing superfluous activities and delays in product delivery and also minimizing defects in the products being delivered. some(prenominal) organizations have gained a militant edge by implementing Kaizen, commonly known as continuous improvement (CI).The philosophy of Kaizen was spearheaded by Masaaki Imai, and is constituted of deuce words, kai which means change and zen which means good as advantageously as wisdom. Hence we can conclude that Kaizen implies changes for the break off and covers all processes in an organization like Engineering, Information Technology, Finance, Procurement and Supply, Customer Service and Manufacturing.CI can be initiated either at Top Management level or at Process level based on telling feedback system. The most important factor is that, all employees should be responsible to make improvements and must travel to lodgeher to identify the go needed to improve the efficiency of the o verall process, in an iterative manner. This requires thorough supervision, flexible march cast and technology to improve business efficiency.When an ceremonious organization like Corus attempts to differentiate its products or services from its competitors in the industry, CI can be the Differentiation or Focus competitive strategies which can help the organization grow.Corus has implemented CI of flow where the products are pulled through a carefully throwned production process from the supply of raw steel to the unblemished steel plate. The process is paced and scheduled to control the amount of product in each stage of the process, to keep bottlenecks to a token(prenominal) and to maintain senior high quality.A plowshare of the CI process involves the ginmillment of improvements to gauge, whether the improvements have resulted in benefits. These results can be reducing waste time, saving money and efforts, or go against utilization of available resources. These are th e tangible benefits of the implementation of a CI process. The intangible benefits allow include greater staff motivation and increased job satisfaction3.In Corus, improvement is gauged with the help of a set of new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) focused on meeting customer deadlines, much(prenominal) as zero backlog of customer orders and meeting targets for cast steel plate in its allotted week. hence benchmark level can be set and attempts can be made to better that level in an iterative manner.When Why CI need to be implemented?It is human nature to feel secure in ones easy environment of a CASH COW organization and therefore pile are hesitant towards big changes. Some of the most common excuses that community give to avoid changes at workplace are1) Its been done in this commission for a long time2) We know theres a better way but theres not enough time to fix things3) I dont get paid extra to think4) Its not my paradox but someone elses problemHowever, a key aspe ct of implementing CI is the fact that it does not engage with big changes, but with smaller ones that take less time to implement at minimal cost. Also, an interesting aspect would be that it gradually transforms and brings astir(predicate) what one can call a big change without pile being hesitant and overcoming their apprehensions. The objective is to minimize cost by leverage the existing knowledge pool and gradually implementing changes.The key of effectively implementing CI is that it has to become a part of the organizations gardening and gain consensus from the work force and stake holders. Like in the Corus case, moving from Tonnage, the traditional key measure of productivity to the smooth paced process of CI involved a remarkable work culture change for the employees.Initiation and integration of CI1. hive up feedback from the horses mouth It is imperative to understand the operations at the ground level from the people who perform the tasks on a regular basis. By postulation for ideas and by listening to those that know how the job is currently performed you will achieve a much greater buy-in from your teams2. Place checks and implement improvement process cycle Not jumping to conclusions is the key here. Put into practice the steps of Plan, Do, Check and Act known as PDCA ModelPDCA a artless model for CI implementationPlan the plan strain constitutes of prospect objectives and goals that would form the guiding path for the entire process of improvement.Do the Do manakin requires the testing of possible alternatives and arriving at a solution that would comply with trounce practices and industry benchmarksCheck In this phase, the effectiveness of the action phase is evaluated to ascertain the achiever of the plans and also to see if any negative consequences have arisen.Act The act phase is to implement the tried and tested processes and form the new standards. If the processes are unsuccessful, then(prenominal) the cycle is rep eated till the time desirable results are attained. redden after the process has been established, the implementation of CI is not over. The goal of CI is to set newer and more efficient benchmarks. This philosophy has to become a part of the organizations culture.For example, in the Scunthorpe plant of Corus, a CI manager co-ordinates the process and 40 CI coaches chosen from the workforce received training to facilitate improvements. A toolbox of techniques has been put together to help managers, employees and operators understand where and how they can improve their work and come up with new ideas to change processes for better. Scunthorpe plate mill has set out a 5-year vision improvement plan which will help in the process of developing a CI culture for the business and has held workshops for employees to understand the vision and change since it was recognized that people top executive be resistant and cling to old ways of working. The 5 year-plan, established a timeline for the thorough acceptance and implementation of the CI culture among employees so that by the end of the 5-year period, the team and individuals are empowered to take obligation and make decisions for themselves.Tradeoffs in implementing Continuous ImprovementAlthough several companies have benefitted from implementing CI, its sooner interesting to see that something this innovative and cost effective could also jump out the organization from its path to success or even create a new bottleneck in the entire process.At times CI may lead to a trade-off in the midst of self-management and discipline 5. over engagement and a lack of prioritization in implementing new wave CI manufacturing strategies by front line managers and operations staff has echtly led to a tradeoff between their core operations related work and CI related activities. Often, CI strategies led by an over-enthusiastic HR has caused them to over strategize which is a new bottle neck in itself and often goes un fin d. and so it is quite important to make sure that less than 7% of the gibe work time may be spent by such key operational personnel office on CI oriented schema development so that their core operational responsibilities may not be diluted beyond an acceptable limit.Another very interesting drawback that has been noticed is the invert effect of over emphasis on the implementation of CI Practices on the price v/s quality competitive scheme model 6. In her study, Barbara Flynn has very effectively shown that an uninterrupted iteration of CI programs for the reduction of cost price would ultimately result in increasing price since perfection always comes at a premium. Secondly it was also observed that in the quest to achieve the goal of CI at heart its somaated time period, the complex untested assumptions about the relation between process and outcome are often deliberately not studied in depth. Managers prematurely conclude that any detrimental effects of implementing the new plan would be taken care of in subsequent CI programs 7. Thus such complacency could result in mission failure at the nth hour.But still, careful and well planned implementation of CI strategy is effective because it keeps production processes under control, rapidly trains production personnel to effectively manage production and possesses the flexibility to slot improvements into production schedules with minimum disruptions and at least effective cost. 8Continuous Improvement in action at FORD India (A firsthand account) 9Cost step-down activity has become one of the major activities in any industry especially in Automobile field with ever increasing competition.The following is a firsthand account of Continuous Improvement initiate undertaken at Ford India for Cost Reduction.The Front End Module of the car is a plastic molded steel reinforced part, supplied to Ford by a Vendor X. The Input burthen of the steel portion in that is 4.0 Kg and its output weight is 1.0 Kg. With 25% fall, Ford saw the scope for cost reduction in the above module.Normally for any steel part, yield of at least 40 to 50% is expected. Hence, the only way to pull down the cost would by reducing the input weight. After several discussions with skilful department, Ford decided to optimize the design to reduce the input weight and proposed the modified design to the vendor. Various trials were conducted and accordingly the design was altered without pliable on the quality of the final part. After several iterations, the new design was approved by the quality team. Minor modifications were made to existing tools in order to work with new design.This Continuous Improvement initiative not only reduced cost but also reduced the challenge content and process time.Suggestions for CorusCorus has implemented lean manufacturing method of CI, which has really ameliorate its deliveries and quality but only in an internal manner. Yet another(prenominal) dimension which can be facilitated th rough external feedback is available in the form of WOWing the customer. What we feel is that, Corus should start to simultaneously work upon gaining better customer feedback to facilitate continued product design improvement. This combined effort will enable them to suggest improvements in the product demanded by the customers which may exceed the customers expectation and will make them feel that they are acquiring a value for money preposition. Thus this would add to their customer satisfaction, memory and self sustainable associations which would be mutually beneficial.References and Bibliographyhttp//www.corusgroup.com/en/company/about_corus/http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizenhttp//www.helium.com/items/558484-what-is-a-continuous-improvement-plan? page=3http//www.helium.com/items/558484-what-is-a-continuous-improvement-plan?page=2Continuous improvement the trade-off between self-management and discipline Author(s)Alan Harrison JournalIntegrated Manufacturing Systems6, 7, 8- Ach ieving simultaneous cost and differentiation competitive advantages through continuous Publication Journal of Managerial Issues by Flynn, Barbara B.9. From actual work experience of Santhosh Srinivasan