A look at focused improvement in manufacturing

Focused improvement is a way to approach manufacturing improvement that will help you improve all levels of the manufacturing process and your entire company.By implementing a focused improvement approach, then you will be able to ensure that your entire organization is working smoothly and that your organization's goals and efforts are being accomplished.

Before you can implement focused improvement in your manufacturing processes, you need to decide what your goal is going to be for focused improvement.You also need to set up a way to measure the improvement of your manufacturing performance.By measuring performance, you will be able to see how well your organization is succeeding at implementing your new plans, strategies, and goals.While you can use financial measures as a way to measure your performance and your improvement, financial measures end up having a number of problems with them.Here are some of the problems with traditional financial performance measures:

Problems with financial measures of performance
-- they do not give you a good reflection of what the customer wants
-- they do not give you strategies that you need in order to beat your competition
-- they identify problems, but they cannot identify the causes of those problems
-- they do not support measures to solve problems
-- they are inflexible
-- they do not support innovation, but rather prohibit it
-- they encourage a large volume of activity, but they do not encourage useful activity

A focused improvement approach to improving manufacturing operations will help you work against these problems with traditional financial performance measures.A focused improvement system will be more relevant to your actual strategies and goals, and will help you improve your overall approach to manufacturing.Focused improvement will support changes in your operations, rather than working against change and innovation.

The following are the different parts of the control system that you must implement in order to control and contain your manufacturing operations.

Elements of control include the following:

1. Establishing a target or an overall plan.


2. Establishing a tolerable deviation from that plan or target.


3. A way to measure the actual deviation from the plan or the target.


4. A comparison between the actual results and your plan.


5. A way to identify potential areas for improvement as a result of the comaprison.


6. Feedback that will identify significant deviations from your plan or target.


7. A way to correct deviations.

The only way that you can establish focused improvement in your manufacturing systems is by implementing a process of control that will let you take charge of your manufacturing operations.A focused improvement approach to manufacturing will help you achieve your goals to beat your competition, fulfill customer demands, and then measure how you are achieving what you desire.Your focused improvement approach to manufacturing will also help you communicate your goals and communicate whether or not your strategies are up to date and your decisions are helping you achieve your goals and your objectives.Finally, a focused improvement strategy will also help you come up with innovative ways to meet your goals and will help you find any problem areas.In addition, a focused improvement strategy will help you compare your practices to other practices, record your achievements, set your goals, and will give you feedback to how your strategies are working.Employing a specialist in focused improvement will help you implement focused improvement throughout your organization, helping you achieve your goals and improve your overall manufacturing processes.