Vitamin Pills versus Painkillers: Process Improvement Analogy

Is your business improvement like
painkillers or vitamin pills?

One of the obvious things to do when you're practicing process improvement techniques is to find out what approach you are taking. Are you proactive or reactive?

'Aches and pains' in your business are a great way of finding areas to focus proactively upon. Many people ignore them and do not look for the root causes behind the headaches in their business, leaving them unable to find a good way to improve the business' performance until it gets too late.

Many times improvement activities are seen as some sort of remedy when a part of the business is broken, akin to a broken leg, but it doesn't have to be like this. If you don't currently have a 'broken leg' then you can view business process improvement activity as vitamin pills, a way to improve your day-to-day productivity without having to wait for some kind of major problem to occur and instigate change.

So a decision has to be made. Do we want to wait until we have a broken leg, or do we want to find ways to make our business process improvement more like vitamin pills and aim to benefit from continuous ongoing improvements?

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The Kaizen Checklist is here!

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