Coordinate improvement teams across the organisation

When your Improvement Program is picking up steam, you'll notice that there are way more teams, small and large projects and all kinds of Problem Solving efforts than you will be able to coordinate from a central level. Luckily, you won't have to: coordinate the direction, then train and trust your managers to specialists to manage improvement efforts on their level.

This is sort of a part two to my previous video - we dive deeper into how you can coordinate Improvement Teams, Kaizen Events, DMAIC's and Autonomous Maintenance throughout your operation. We've discussed the idea of going through the Control, Improve and Visioning loops at each management level - the logical extension is that each level also has their own Improvement Teams to pick and manage.

You might call these improvement efforts by different names at different management levels, but the main thing to watch is who provides the resources and whose sphere of responsibilities most needs the results.
For example: most projects by a Production Support Specialist, who works on all kinds of line optimisations and reports directly to the Production Manager, should be managed by that Production Manager (or maybe by that manager's main meeting, i.e. the daily/weekly department meeting). From time to time, that Specialist will be freed up to lead a 5-man cross departmental team to make a bigger improvement, backed by site resources - that project will be managed from the Site Management team. This last project is also the more likely to be guided and coordinated by the site's CI team.

Make sure each management level knows what the organisation above and around them wants to achieve, determine their KPI targets, and you won't need to coordinate each individual improvement team (as long as that department is reaching their target, of course).

Now, when you're still building up the program and there's not that much experience in the lower organisational levels to pick, run and control projects; you'll be coordinating those Improvement Teams directly, but that's more of a pilot situation, not the final CI organisation you should be aiming for.

To compare project benefits and plan enough Improvement teams to close the Gap between your Current Performance and the Budget Targets, be sure to check out my course of how to calculate savings: https://www.tommentink.com/savings-re...

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   • Coordinate improvement teams across t...  

00:00 Introduction to Coordination
01:13 Aligning Goals Strategically
03:18 Cascading Targets Down the Line
05:23 Granting Departments Autonomy
07:27 Managing Improvement Levels
10:29 Balancing CI Department Oversight
12:53 Setting Control Levels