Process improvement

• Quality management
• Environmental management
• Health and safety
• Integrated management
• Process improvement
• Contact the MCR
• Customer feedback
• Become a registered consultant

Quality is a never ending quest and process improvement is a never ending effort to discover and eliminate the main causes of problems. It accomplishes this by using small-steps improvements, rather than implementing one huge improvement.

Process improvement means making things better. It is not fighting fires. Its goal is not to blame people for problems or failures. It is simply a way of looking at how we can do our work better. When we take a problem solving approach, we often never get to the root causes because our main goal is to put out the fire. But when we engage in process improvement, we seek to learn what causes things to happen and then use this knowledge to:

• Reduce variation
• Remove activities that have no value to the organisation
• Improve customer satisfaction

Process improvement is important as it has often been said that process account for 80% of all problems while people account for the remaining 20%.

Process improvement involves a series of actions taken to identify, analyse and improve existing processes within an organisation to meet new goals and objectives. These actions often follow a specific methodology or strategy to create successful results.

There is a wide variety of tools among which are:

• Statistical Process Control (SPC)
• Total Quality Management (TQM)
• Six Sigma
• Lean Manufacturing
• Process mapping and procedures