Continuous improvement? How Coimbee helps you to be and stay successful.
You are the driving force behind Continuous Improvement every day. But of course you cannot do this alone. Continuous Improvement can only be successful if you work together with colleagues, employees, customers and chain partners.
But precisely because of this, this approach, besides being inspiring, is also vulnerable. The literature gives a success rate of only 15%! In 85% of cases, the process is thus stopped prematurely!
Failure factors and how to prevent and eliminate them.
Almost every project starts with enthusiasm and quick wins by picking low-hanging fruit. But as soon as we have to reach higher, it becomes difficult. What are the most important failure factors?
1) The results of the improvement initiatives take a long time to come.
After the quick wins with the low-hanging fruit, great gains can be made on improvement initiatives that require more stamina. But those have to compete with the operational problems that require your attention right now. The fact that the success of these improvement initiatives takes longer, while today’s problems are immediately tangible, makes the sticking with Continuous Improvement often difficult.
2) The complexity and coherence of the improvement initiatives increases.
Whereas the first initiatives were often relatively simple, in terms of investment and approach, and could be tackled within a single group or department, there is an increasing demand for collaboration with other parties. This can be collaboration with other groups or departments, and sometimes even with other companies or organizations. This is necessary in order to tap into the right knowledge and experience to arrive at a good approach, or because the approach and implementation affect multiple organizational units.
3) Overhead of Continuous Improvement
The last factor that throws sand into the gears of Continuous Improvement is the often underestimated overhead that such processes require. The initiatives must be documented and assessed, and the status and progress information must be continuously shared with all stakeholders. This usually means that many Excel sheets have to be created and updated, from which, weekly or monthly, management reports must be distilled repeatedly. This quickly degenerates into ‘juggling’ information, which requires more and more effort to realize and distribute fully and on time. Usually, you soon lag behind the facts.
The Coimbee toolbox
By change agents, for change agents
Coimbee is a tool that has been developed by change agents, who have been busy for many years in guiding and managing continuous improvement projects, for change agents who are working constantly on Continuous Improvement. Coimbee has the following characteristics:
- Easy documentation It makes it possible to have simple, but unambiguous and structured, improvement initiatives documented by the employees themselves. Depending on the status of the initiative, the information can be enriched {problem, suggestion, milestones, (interim) deliverables, yield, stakeholders, timing, etc.}. Because the employees can document the initiatives themselves, they are more stimulated to come up with ideas for improvement and to become ‘owners’ of their own initiatives.
- Clear dashboard It has a dashboard that is partially adjustable by you to the characteristics and PIs of your organization. It provides real-time information about the starting, ongoing and successful improvement initiatives and their cohesion. With one click of a button, this information can be made visible for all or for specific stakeholders.
- Extra attention or role model It provides information about which initiatives and/or employees need extra attention and which initiatives or employees can serve as an inspiring role model for other initiatives.
- Best practices/templates It contains best practices/templates to arrive at a good improvement initiative. It indicates how this can be documented in a structured way. Think of an A3 report, support with the execution of the PDCA circle, but also the centralized documentation of lessons-learned, so that a lot of knowledge is collected.
- Accessible and up-to-date The information in the Coimbee Toolbox is accessible to everyone and always up-to-date. This contributes to the culture of continuous improvement.
- Simple link In the Coimbee Toolbox, you can easily connect with strategic initiatives and suggestions for improvement. Managing this is very simple.
The Coimbee effect
By consistently applying the Coimbee tool, you can minimize the failure factors. We call that the Coimbee effect.
1) When the results of the improvement initiatives are delayed:
Because it is possible to document and monitor interim deliverables and milestones easily, per improvement initiative, longer-term initiatives can be divided into pieces. As a result, they become more transparent, and successes can be achieved in the short term, and celebrated. By celebrating demonstrable successes on interim results, confidence in a successful result of the complete initiative is maintained.
2) The coherence – even in complex processes – of the improvement initiatives increases:
The interim deliverables also help the complex processes. By cutting these into pieces, the overview improves. By making all information clear in real time, for all stakeholders, it becomes easier to coordinate, and action can be taken in a timely manner.
3) Managing Overhead of Continuous Improvement more easily.
And last but not least, it is much easier to manage the required overhead of the often extensive improvement projects. The Coimbee tool makes the Excel spreadsheets completely unnecessary. The improvement initiatives and corresponding status can be documented by the employees themselves. The related management information can be viewed in real time with the help of a dashboard, without extra effort.
Is your organization ripe for the Coimbee effect?
The Coimbee toolbox is web-based, low-threshold and powerful. It can help your organization to be successful with Continuous Improvement. But is your organization ready for the Coimbee effect?
Coimbee toolbox
Because you know that despite the success rate of only 15%, the market forces you to continual improvement, you still want to get started, but preferably with lasting success. You provide the perseverance, the attention at the MT level and the leadership, but wouldn’t it be nice if there were a tool that supports you in the right way to minimize the aforementioned failure factors? The Coimbee toolbox is that tool.
