Continuous Improvement

July 18, 2015

The management system that helped Japan radically overhaul their entire manufacturing process more than fifty years ago may be just the ticket to keep your museum store on the cutting edge. Often referred to as the Continuous Improvement Process (CIP) or Total Quality System (TQS), this management style has been successfully adopted by companies – both large and small – across the United States. The essence of Continuous Improvement is actually quite simple and can be a valuable tool for managing a museum store.

If one of your goals is to constantly improve what you do, then you’re already practicing the mantra of CIP.  For museum store operators, the obvious places to focus include customer, employee, and supplier relationships, as well as your overall business strategy and improved efficiencies.

As you think about Continuous Improvement, it is evolutionary rather than revolutionary.  Changes are meant to be made in small increments as you go rather than something more radical.  Ideally, these small improvements don’t require a large investment of either time or money.  A good analogy is replacing an incandescent light fixture with a more efficient LED unit.  You don’t lose anything in the process and the result is better.

Of course, the essence of Continuous Improvement is the ongoing cycle of re-evaluation. The website ASQ.org is a global community built around quality assurance, and features a four step quality model, the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle, PDCA is the essence of Continuous Improvement:

• Plan: Identify an opportunity and plan for change.
• Do: Implement the change on a small scale.
• Check: Use data to analyze the results of the change and determine whether it made a difference.
• Act: If the change was successful, implement it on a wider scale and continuously assess your results. If the change did not work, begin the cycle again.

Perhaps one of the best features of the Continuous Improvement Process is that many of the changes are driven by the employees.  Every employee should become a partner in the process… making observations, suggesting ways to improve, implementing those improvements and then re-evaluating and honing the process.  By engaging your team in the process, you encourage them to take greater ownership of their work and to find ways to improve their own performance.

The evaluation part of CIP requires both analysis and common sense.  As improvements are installed, over time you should see measurable results.  By analyzing the numbers, you should be able to adjust and continually improve the process. The results may be incremental, so patience and insight are a key part of the plan. But the goal is to continually move your operation in the right direction.

Total Quality has been touted for years; at its core is a commonsense approach to the things you do every day. Perhaps the biggest difference with CIP is that you stop to analyze everything you do in the hopes of making it better.

To get more information about CIP and TQM, the ASQ.org website is a good place to start.

Steve White is a freelance writer living and working in Denver, Colo.