Small improvements are less likely to require major capital investment than major process changes.As the ideas come from the workers themselves, they are less likely to be radically different, and therefore easier to implement.Improvements are based on many small changes rather than the radical changes that might arise from Research and Development.Evolution: The emphasis of CIP is on incremental, continual steps rather than giant leaps.

Efficiency: The purpose of CIP is the identification, reduction, and elimination of suboptimal processes.

Feedback: The core principle of CIP is the (self) reflection of processes.

This method became famous from Imai's 1986 book Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success. Some successful implementations use the approach known as kaizen (the translation of kai ('change') zen ('good') is 'improvement'). Put simply, it means 'getting better all the time'.' ' : 498 Kaizen Improvement in business strategy, business results, customer, employee and supplier relationships can be subject to continual improvement. It is not limited to quality initiatives. focused on increasing the effectiveness and/or efficiency of an organisation to fulfil its policy and objectives.

Ī broader definition is that of the Institute of Quality Assurance who defined 'continuous improvement as a gradual never-ending change which is: '. The fact that it can be called a management process does not mean that it needs to be executed by 'management' but rather merely that it makes decisions about the implementation of the delivery process and the design of the delivery process itself. Edwards Deming, a pioneer of the field, saw it as part of the 'system' whereby feedback from the process and customer were evaluated against organisational goals. Some see CIPs as a meta-process for most management systems (such as business process management, quality management, project management, and program management). Delivery (customer valued) processes are constantly evaluated and improved in the light of their efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility. These efforts can seek ' incremental' improvement over time or 'breakthrough' improvement all at once. Ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processesĪ continual improvement process, also often called a continuous improvement process (abbreviated as CIP or CI), is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes.

Continuously improving synonym