Some foundational tools to help businesses continually improve (Part 1)

In this day and age, it seems that most manufacturers have a common goal: “Continuous improvement”, but not all organizations find an effective solution to do this.

Many managers have chosen to rely only on the advice of experts in the area of ​​improvement and to ignore their employees’ opinions in the organization. Others use improvement ideas within the organization to prioritize solving specific problems. These approaches may not seem bad at first, but inconsistencies between management and employees, or spontaneous patterns will gradually reveal weaknesses that hinder the improvement process.

This will be fixed if you build a continual improvement plan that is integrated from many different production aspects. There are tons of innovative tools out there that can help you with the planning process, and more importantly, they’re completely free.

SWOT analysis

SWOT is the abbreviation of the first letters of the English words: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. The SWOT analysis sheet is a useful tool if you are looking for improvement opportunities based on the existing resources of the organization. Not only that, SWOT also provides weights to help compare the Opportunity / Threat ratio to help managers optimize cost effectiveness.

Although more like a model than an analytical method, SWOT can provide useful guidance for identifying production operations problems as part of the continual improvement process. SWOT helps you to understand whether you are investing effectively or not or whether your marketing efforts are using it. A model of sustainable continuous improvement is one that can satisfy the rational use of resources in the long run, as well as promote the inherent strengths of the organization.

General data analysis

The analysis is actually relatively simple; The first step is always to collect data and then build an analysis chart based on these data. The data analysis is divided into four basic types: Analysis of sales, output in a time frame (Descriptive analytics); Diagnostic analytics to find the root cause; Predictive analytics to help you measure the effectiveness of your production and business activities (Prescriptive analytics). Each analytical method brings significant benefits in the path of continuous improvement.

In this day and age, managers can go further by using free data analysis tools, especially in the case of big data. If you want to configure an automated analysis engine yourself, you can use the R programming language – An open platform for building highly customizable data models.

However, if you have no programming knowledge and want to perform tasks conveniently and quickly, you can check out Tableau. This tool can interact with any type of data from Excel, Data Warehouse to Web Data. With the free version only, managers can track data with visual tables drawn in real time. A number of other in-depth analysis functions have also been added to the expanded version of Tableau for organizations wishing to further improve their production systems.

Productivity and Quality Office