Continuous Improvement and Kaizen Training

The following 6 training courses are available (linked to highlights below). They can be readily tailored to suit individual requirements for in-house workshops.

C01 Focused Improvement Systems

C02 Setting Key Performance Indicators (KPI's)

C03 Measures of Performance

C04 Continuous Improvement Basic Tools and Techniques

C06 Improvement Techniques Pick and Mix

And from our other pages:

S13 Culture Development Methods

OM01 Organising & Engaging the Team

C01 Focused Improvement Systems

(Identifying Waste & Establishing Durable Continuous Improvement)

(1 day) (Course Schedules), (Request course details)

Designed for:

Directors, managers, team leaders and continuous improvement facilitators and anyone wishing to improve their business organically through continuous improvement programmes, or who is frustrated by failed, short lived, or ineffective continuous improvement initiatives, or understands the tools and techniques but does not have an improvement process to drive continuous improvement.

Course Objectives:

Establishing an environment where relevant, beneficial, durable and participative continuous improvement can thrive is much more than giving operations personnel the tools and techniques and letting them get on with it, or employing a specialist to either do it for them, or cajole them into doing something.

This course which is complementary to C02, C03, and C04 (below) provides the keys for you to unlock this huge potential. It will show you how to create the leadership, organisation, culture, and processes to make beneficial, bottom up, change initiatives a routine, without employing additional specialists. It will enable you to:

Identify the key ingredients for Relevant, Ongoing, Participative, Durable, Change
Provide focus for improvement initiatives
Identify behavioural aspects of change and how to deal with them
Be personally motivated to support a continuous improvement programme
Understand the role of Continuous Improvement as part of a change programme.

Course Highlights

This course will show you how to drive continuous improvement by showing you how to:

Sell the need for change
Organise for operational improvement
Recognise waste
Manage change, selecting and using one of the four change mechanisms appropriately
Overcome the problems of sustaining continuous improvement, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma or Kaizen initiatives
Choose which of the five types of change available, is appropriate for individual improvements and what makes them work
Identify & understand the 21 wastes, and how they undermine profitability
Overcome behavioural and cultural barriers to change (overview of S13 Culture Development Methods)
Identify what is important and wasteful and focus improvement on that
Make improvement happen by implementing & driving an ongoing, low budget, improvement process (Key ingredients for Relevant, Ongoing, Durable Change)

Examples of course participant's feedback:

"A well balanced guide of how to adopt Focused Improvement in an operational environment"
"Good structure to the content - Breakout sessions / exercises / action plan"
"I found the sections on engaging the staff and problem management really useful"
"A fresh approach to a subject I have dealt with before"

C02 Setting Key Performance Indicators

(½ day) (Course Schedules), (Request course details)

Designed for:

Directors, managers, team leaders and improvement facilitators

Course Objectives:

You need to convert the company mission statement on the plaque in the foyer into a set of "SMART" organisational objectives to drive improvement.

This course which is complementary to C01 (above) and C03 (below) will enable you to:

Decide what improvements to drive (with priorities) and equally importantly what to leave
- Decide what you are good at and what you need to be good at
- Identify how much you need to improve and set achievable, but stretching, targets
- Understand what pace to improve
Achieve your business plan goals and keep focused

Course Highlights

This course will show you how to develop your development process to:

Understand what your customers really value
Understand your competitive position
Differentiate your products and services
Understand your capabilities and development needs
Provide direction and motivation for change using "strategic" and "best practice" benchmarking (Overview only of S07 A Guide to Benchmarking)
Prioritise developments
Set realistic and stretch targets using "pacing" and "half life" principles of improvement
Develop a road-map to convert an end-game vision into a set of realistic strategies and actions driven by KPI's

Examples of course participant's feedback:

"A valuable way of focusing on our future"
"The technique for understanding product / service differentiation was really useful"
"Covered the topic in an interesting way and in full"
"An excellent foundation for change management"
"Discussions held and relaxed presentation style were really beneficial"
"The "SQAIRPAD" analysis really helped to clarify our competitive position"

C03 Measures of Performance

(½ day) (Course Schedules), (Request course details)

Designed for:

Directors, managers, team leaders and improvement facilitators

Course Objectives:

Measures of performance must influence people's behaviour or there is no point measuring. But you get what you measure provided that the measure exists within a framework that drives performance! But this also means everyone needs to be very clear about why you are measuring and what the framework needs to be!

This course, which is complementary to C01 and C02 (above), will enable you to make sure that you are measuring and managing the important things in the correct way to motivate your staff at all levels to drive improvement

Course Highlights

This course based on our extensive research and experience of motivating staff at all levels within business to participate and contribute to business improvement will show you how to:

Design a performance measurement system and individual measures:
To meet the high level business KPI's
Without producing local optima at the expense of the whole
But which is sensitive to local context
To engage all of the 6 drivers of performance
To recognise good and bad performance measures
and good and bad performance management (Balanced SCORECARD)
Implement measures that actually drive beneficial change
rather than provide unfocused, trivial "continuous improvement"
Make the KPI's a living reality that drives the business forward as part of a " Focused Improvement System"
Deal with the motivational aspects of change management
Provide joined up management and make your staff partners in business improvement by making relevant performance achievement a regular topic of conversation

Examples of course participant's feedback:

"I now understand why the KPI by itself can be de-motivating and why a measure has to be relevant to the people it is intended to influence"
"The practical examples were really relevant"
"We now have the methodologies and tools for facilitating change!"
"I can not only see the objectives, I can now see the drivers and how to motivate staff to achieve the KPI's"
"The "SCORECARD" was really useful in designing the measures"

C04 Continuous Improvement Basic Tools & Techniques

(2 days) (Course Schedules), (Request course details)

Designed for:

Managers Team leaders, supervisors prior to implementation and then onwards to all staff new to continuous improvement and who you would like to engage in this process

Course Objectives:

It is not just the toolkit that makes continuous improvement a living day-to-day reality. It is an improvement and problem solving structure within which to focus the use of these tools and techniques and the motivation and ability to use them.

Using only 15 basic tools and techniques that are simple to learn and apply, this hands-on course provides the unique opportunity to use a durable structure and a toolkit to motivate and enable staff to focus on your real business issues and improve performance.

Course Highlights

This course will show you how to:

Understand:
- The need for change; & the threat of not changing
- Criteria for sustaining successful improvement initiatives
- Typical development problems and why they occur
- The five types of change
- Why chose things to improve?
- The 21 wastes and which of these are adversely affecting your business today
Drive change (Control systems); Focused Improvement Systems
Organise for operational improvement
- Manage problems effectively
  - 3 simple rules and 4 things that need sorting
  - Identify problems quickly
  - Get experts working on the problem
  - Reveal hidden problems & near misses
- Avoid "Rolls Royce solutions"; & jumping to improvement conclusions
- Encourage analysis
- Create effective teams and effective team working (overview from OM01 Organising & Engaging the Team)
Manage the resources:
- Understand the needs and capabilities of your resources (CARAP Analysis)
- Reduce equipment downtime
- Get More output for free!
Focus Improvement: The Eight Stage Approach & Their Tools & Techniques (15 tools and techniques are covered at various stages of this approach):
1. What should we be trying to do?
2. What are the main contributing reasons for poor performance?
3. How do we prioritise problems?
4. What are the root causes of the problem?
5. What are the options / possible solutions?
6. How do we know which will be the best?
7. How do we implement solutions well?
8. How do we sustain the improvement & prevent further problems?
Case study team improvement exercise

Examples of course participant's feedback:

"Has given me a different way of looking at continuous improvement techniques and the style to be used"
"I now have a toolkit to try to overcome problems + improve my team's performance"
Very informative and VERY useful"
"Excellent content - Enjoyable, fun and friendly course"
"Gave me a good understanding of the tools required to implement continuous improvement"
"I didn't fall asleep once!"
"Avoids tunnel thinking and encourages lateral thinking"
"Looking at the 8 stages and their tools and techniques and how they apply to real situations in our business was really useful"

C06 Improvement Techniques Pick & Mix Education

(multiples of 1 day) (Course Schedules, (Request course details)

Build your own in-house course by selecting from our library of 79 general improvement techniques

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Whilst great care has been taken to provide relevant, accurate, practical, advice based on our considerable process design and development experience, this will almost certainly require interpretation into the context of your unique business. Please be careful in doing so and if in doubt seek expert advice. We would welcome your feedback!

SM Thacker & Associates

Independent Best Practice Training & Consultancy

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