Ensuring Change Brings Improvement
Business improvement is essential for any successful organisation. We strive for better returns on investment, more efficient processes, less waste, improved training and reduced risk. Businesses that do not look to continuously improve my find themselves overtaken by a hungry competitor who is able to provide a better quality product, faster and at a cheaper price.
What Is Business Improvement?
Put simply, business improvement is a process of change within or organisation that moves something from one state to better state. Sometimes these changes can be quite dramatic but more often than not they adopt a process of marginal gains.
The idea being that if every day something improves by just 1%, over a relatively short time these changes will have a much larger impact. Furthermore, as the changes are only small, if anything has a negative impact they can be rolled back quickly with minimal disruption to the business.
- Documenting and applying a process to an everyday task
- Improving billing and reporting methods
- Reviewing and realigning sales & marketing strategies
- Updating payroll procedures
- Creating new products & services
- Implementing new technologies
- Reviewing operational procedures to meet new supply & demand requirements
- Ensuring effective communication with employees
- Reviewing staff training
- Capturing feedback & ideas from staff members
These are just a small selection of seemingly different tasks with varying size and complexity. They do however have the same aim. Save time, save money, reduce risk. This is business improvement.
Business improvement can be applied to seemingly unrelated tasks and can be undertaken by people in quite different roles.
This will generally result in differing approaches to how improvement and change are achieved. That might seem obvious as people performing different roles will change things in different ways. Business improvement is not about the change itself however. Successful business improvement is about delivering positive results.
Whilst changing a reporting structure is wildly different from launching a new product, both should achieve a tangible result. A proposed change may seem appropriate in its initial presentation, but that improvement needs to be monitored and recorded to ensure it is improving what was there before.
Having an idea to change something is one thing, knowing how to bring that improvement to fruition is another.
You may have been in your roll for years which brings pro’s and con’s to the challenge of change. While you understand the process inside and out, you may also have the underlying feeling of ‘this is how it’s always been done’.
Equally you may be new to your position where the challenges are reversed. For you, anything can change but you may be hesitant whilst you learn about your new role.
In both these scenarios, having a proven method and approach to business improvement ensures you have a platform to explore your idea, ensure it delivers what you intend, and helps improve engagement from those around you.
The P7 Way is our framework for achieving recognised change and improvement.
Our wealth of experience across a wide range of industries, combined with an in-depth knowledge of lean methodology has allowed us to craft an approach we not only believe in, but guarantee its success.
We will be with you through each of 7 steps bringing success and leaving you not only with positive results but an environment positively engaging with continuous improvement.