Continuous improvement – How does it work as a strategy?

by Michael W. Van Belle, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of The High Companies 

Continuous improvement (CI) is not a strategy within itself, but a means to improve results regardless of strategy. The improvement can be in products, services, or processes and various methods in CI exist depending on the results needed. The magnitude of improvement gained also varies greatly…for example, Policy Deployment focuses on ‘breakthrough’ improvements over a single or multiple years while the MDI (Managing for Daily Improvement) process will focus on ‘incremental’ improvements on fundamental processes on a daily basis.

At High Industries, we focus our CI activities on business strategies using Policy Deployment. Policy Deployment lets us align our capital and human resources with the larger scale projects and activities needed to achieve our goals. We use MDI to help functions and CI measure their results on a near real-time basis, understand opportunities for improvement, and determine the impact of improvement activities.