Many people believe that Continuous Improvement is a culture.  It certainly is in the eyes of the Japanese and many others, but is continuous improvement really a culture or something else? …Read More

Healthcare performance improvement and healthcare performance management are intertwined and require a holistic approach to setting the right targets and accountabilities.  The complexity of all the things healthcare teams need to be good at makes this a daunting task when going it alone. Hospitals need to excel in these primary areas: …Read More

This case study describes how a healthcare consulting team of process improvement experts, utilizing Lean Techniques, were able to help a home healthcare provider improve annual profitability by $900K, reduce overtime by 50%, increase productivity by 10% and increase revenue by 3%. …Read More

The Internet of Everything: 8.4 billion and $2 trillion!  Those are the estimated number of connected ‘things’ on the internet and the amount spent on these devices and services by the end of 2017, according to a Gartner study.  The number of connected things is expected to …Read More

After Action Review, Post Mortem, Critique… all are terms used to describe an assessment of a project, event or activity after said project is completed.  Our experience is that the After Action Review process is an important continuous improvement tool especially for major transformative activities such as the implementation of new digital technologies (software systems, user tools, etc.), …Read More

Continuous Improvement has a long history in the business world and after over 50 years many leadership teams we talk to believe that it can be done quickly and throughout the entire organization in 6-12 months.  How wrong they are.

Part III is about …Read More

In Part I, I identified 5 things you need to do to drive Continuous Improvement.  In this article, we show how business strategy should drive continuous improvement programs and not the other way around.  The 5 things were: …Read More

Most leadership teams believe they have a pretty good handle on how well the company is doing from a cost and productivity standpoint. They probably do know the people side fairly well being that it is relatively easy to measure:  $Revenue/$ of labor cost or $Revenue/person is a standard measure, while time standards for all sorts of activities are very common.  

Attempting to understand how efficient their business processes are is …Read More

There have been many articles written about continuous improvement in manufacturing processes, but there isn’t a lot of information and understanding about the use of continuous improvement tools at the business level: including the ones that purportedly have continuous improvement or Six Sigma programs in place.  In many of the organizations that we work in, when you speak to business process leaders about continuous improvement they …Read More