What is a Continuous Improvement Process and Why is it Important?
A continuous improvement process delineates the steps necessary in evaluating the effectiveness of your processes and improving those that are not performing to standard.
It is important to have a standardised continuous improvement process as it allows you to accurately evaluate how well your processes are performing whilst identifying areas that require improvement without disrupting your daily operations.
A successful continuous improvement process will help drive continual improvement within your organisation and ensure that you are complying to standards.
How to Create Your Own Continuous Improvement Process
In the initial stages of planning your continuous improvement process, you’ll firstly want to consider the objectives you want to accomplish using this process.
For a continuous improvement process, your end goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of your processes and introduce effective improvements to those that are not up to standard.
Once you have established your main objective you can now begin thinking about the starting and endpoints of your workflow.
In our free template which you can download below, we choose to begin our continuous improvement process with identifying the process for evaluation and end it with the ongoing monitoring of the newly implemented improvements.
Now you can think about the other steps that are required that will allow the process to move from your starting and endpoints.
Think about all the steps a process needs to go through so that it can be evaluated and improved successfully.
Next you can start considering who is going to be involved in your continuous improvement process. Think carefully about the stakeholders involved, their specific responsibilities and what information they will need to effectively complete the task at hand.
Don’t forget one role could have responsibilities on a number of different steps. Additionally, multiple roles might have responsibilities on one step.
Our template uses generic roles such as ‘Process Owner’ and ‘Improvement Team’. You could use these or you may want to use role names that are tailored specifically to your organisation.
Jomo247 incorporates a custom role manager into our workflow designer meaning you can easily control exactly who is involved in each different step of your process.
Once your plan has been established you can now begin creating your workflow template.
You could use more traditional methods to create an image of your continuous improvement process.
However, we would recommend using a software like Jomo247 which allows you to digitally build your workflow templates and automate your workflows making process management a breeze.
Once your template is finished you can now implement your new continuous improvement process. Remember to always monitor the performance of your new workflows in real time in case further improvements are needed.
Continual improvement of workflows is critical to achieving ISO compliance and guaranteeing your organisation operates optimally.
You can download our continuous improvement process template below as a PDF, or you can sign up to Jomo247 today and design and automate your business processes online.
