Focused improvement

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Focused improvement in the theory of constraints is an ensemble of activities aimed at elevating the performance of any system, especially a business system, with respect to its goal by eliminating its constraints one by one and by not working on non-constraints. [1]

Contents

Focused improvement can also be defined in simpler terms as a process that identifies the systems problems and then modifies the whole system in order to find the most cost effective, time saving and least disruptive solutions in order to optimize the system.

"Focused Improvement is the process of applying systematic problem solving methods to manufacturing. The process relies on aligning the correct method to the correct scenario".

Development and Apparition

Focused improvement was developed as a working part of the Theory of Constraints management philosophy by Eliyahu M. Goldratt in his 1984 book titled The Goal , that is geared to help organizations continually achieve their goals. Unlike other popular performance improvement methods, such as TQM or reengineering, F.I. focuses on solving real life problems and not on increasing the costs and distractions for the management's attention.

Focused improvement V.S. Total Quality Management (TQM)

No general agreement has been reached about the characteristics of F.I. or TQM but to some extent we can observe similar traits in implementations of these processes.

Traits of Focused improvement

  1. Identify the system's constraint(s).
  2. Decide how to exploit the system's constraint(s).
  3. Subordinate everything else to the above decision(s).
  4. Elevate the system's constraint(s).
  5. Communicate the new approach and move to the next improvement [2]

Traits of TQM

  1. "Quality is defined by customers' requirements."
  2. "Top management has direct responsibility for quality improvement."
  3. "Increased quality comes from systematic analysis and improvement of work processes."
  4. "Quality improvement is a continuous effort and conducted throughout the organization."

These two philosophies have the same main goal but they go about achieving it two different ways. The FI delivers short term results that can be translated into long term success if the process is repeated correctly without allowing it to lose momentum. The TQM has at its base client satisfaction but it only yields long term results. When choosing one of these two processes management has to take into account what are the company needs.

Uses and potential

Products that are based on embedded computer systems has seen a rapid increase. During this time the features that are controlled or supported by software systems that are embedded have suffered an increase in their role becoming crucial. All these developments make it necessary to create and innovate new approaches for software process improvement that focus on improving specific product traits. [3]

Focused improvement can be used not only in business systems but in any type of system be it healthcare, education, waste management, space exploration systems (NASA, etc.).

Functioning principles

The FI is based on the Five Thinking Processes that enable it to work in any cognitive system. The working principle of the five thinking processes is represented by the users ability to answer the following questions:

  1. What to change?
  2. What to change it into?
  3. How to cause the change?
  4. Why Change?
  5. How to maintain the process of ongoing improvement ?

If all questions have an answer then the Focused improvement [4] can be applied with relative ease

Useful quotes [5]

"Focused improvement includes all activities that maximize the overall effectiveness of equipment, processes, and plants through uncompromising elimination of losses* and improvement of performance." [6]

The objective of Focused Improvement is to assure that the equipment maintains a peak performance all the time.

"The fact is machines do virtually 100 percent of the product manufacturing work. The only thing we people do, whether we’re operators, technicians, engineers, or managers, is to tend to the needs of the machines in one way or another. The better our machines run, the more productive our shop floor, and the more successful our business." [7]

The driving concept behind Focused Improvement is bringing your losses as close to zero as possible.

"Maximizing equipment effectiveness requires the complete elimination of failures, defects, and other negative phenomena – in other words, the wastes and losses incurred in equipment operation." [8]

Related Research Articles

A quality management system (QMS) is a collection of business processes focused on consistently meeting customer requirements and enhancing their satisfaction. It is aligned with an organization's purpose and strategic direction. It is expressed as the organizational goals and aspirations, policies, processes, documented information, and resources needed to implement and maintain it. Early quality management systems emphasized predictable outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling. By the 20th century, labor inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signaling of problems via a continual improvement cycle. In the 21st century, QMS has tended to converge with sustainability and transparency initiatives, as both investor and customer satisfaction and perceived quality are increasingly tied to these factors. Of QMS regimes, the ISO 9000 family of standards is probably the most widely implemented worldwide – the ISO 19011 audit regime applies to both and deals with quality and sustainability and their integration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cost accounting</span> Procedures to optimize practices in cost efficient ways

Cost accounting is defined by the Institute of Management Accountants as "a systematic set of procedures for recording and reporting measurements of the cost of manufacturing goods and performing services in the aggregate and in detail. It includes methods for recognizing, classifying, allocating, aggregating and reporting such costs and comparing them with standard costs". Often considered a subset of managerial accounting, its end goal is to advise the management on how to optimize business practices and processes based on cost efficiency and capability. Cost accounting provides the detailed cost information that management needs to control current operations and plan for the future.

Total quality management (TQM) consists of organization-wide efforts to "install and make permanent climate where employees continuously improve their ability to provide on demand products and services that customers will find of particular value." "Total" emphasizes that departments in addition to production are obligated to improve their operations; "management" emphasizes that executives are obligated to actively manage quality through funding, training, staffing, and goal setting. While there is no widely agreed-upon approach, TQM efforts typically draw heavily on the previously developed tools and techniques of quality control. TQM enjoyed widespread attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s before being overshadowed by ISO 9000, Lean manufacturing, and Six Sigma.

The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management paradigm that views any manageable system as being limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints. There is always at least one constraint, and TOC uses a focusing process to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of the organization around it. TOC adopts the common idiom "a chain is no stronger than its weakest link". That means that organizations and processes are vulnerable because the weakest person or part can always damage or break them, or at least adversely affect the outcome.

Six Sigma (6σ) is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. It was introduced by American engineer Bill Smith while working at Motorola in 1986.

Kaizen is a concept referring to business activities that continuously improve all functions and involve all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. Kaizen also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain. It has been applied in healthcare, psychotherapy, life coaching, government, manufacturing, and banking.

A business process, business method or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks performed by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product for a particular customer or customers. Business processes occur at all organizational levels and may or may not be visible to the customers. A business process may often be visualized (modeled) as a flowchart of a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points or as a process matrix of a sequence of activities with relevance rules based on data in the process. The benefits of using business processes include improved customer satisfaction and improved agility for reacting to rapid market change. Process-oriented organizations break down the barriers of structural departments and try to avoid functional silos.

Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production process, i.e. output per unit of input, typically over a specific period of time. The most common example is the (aggregate) labour productivity measure, one example of which is GDP per worker. There are many different definitions of productivity and the choice among them depends on the purpose of the productivity measurement and data availability. The key source of difference between various productivity measures is also usually related to how the outputs and the inputs are aggregated to obtain such a ratio-type measure of productivity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Activity-based costing</span> Method of apportioning costs

Activity-based costing (ABC) is a costing method that identifies activities in an organization and assigns the cost of each activity to all products and services according to the actual consumption by each. Therefore, this model assigns more indirect costs (overhead) into direct costs compared to conventional costing.

Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service consistently functions well. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to achieve it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality. Quality control is also part of quality management. What a customer wants and is willing to pay for it, determines quality. It is a written or unwritten commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market. Quality can be defined as how well the product performs its intended function.

Poka-yoke is a Japanese term that means "mistake-proofing" or "error prevention". A poka-yoke is any mechanism in a process that helps an equipment operator avoid mistakes and defects by preventing, correcting, or drawing attention to human errors as they occur. The concept was formalized, and the term adopted, by Shigeo Shingo as part of the Toyota Production System.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to business management:

In business, engineering, and manufacturing, quality – or high quality – has a pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority or superiority of something ; it is also defined as being suitable for the intended purpose while satisfying customer expectations. Quality is a perceptual, conditional, and somewhat subjective attribute and may be understood differently by different people. Consumers may focus on the specification quality of a product/service, or how it compares to competitors in the marketplace. Producers might measure the conformance quality, or degree to which the product/service was produced correctly. Support personnel may measure quality in the degree that a product is reliable, maintainable, or sustainable. In such ways, the subjectivity of quality is rendered objective via operational definitions and measured with metrics such as proxy measures.

A lean laboratory is one which is focused on processes, procedures, and infrastructure that deliver results in the most efficient way in terms of cost, speed, or both. Lean laboratory is a management and organization process derived from the concept of lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System (TPS). The goal of a lean laboratory is to reduce resource usage and costs while improving productivity, staff morale, and laboratory-driven outcomes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Overall equipment effectiveness</span> Measure of how well a manufacturing operation is utilized

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is a measure of how well a manufacturing operation is utilized compared to its full potential, during the periods when it is scheduled to run. It identifies the percentage of manufacturing time that is truly productive. An OEE of 100% means that only good parts are produced, at the maximum speed, and without interruption.

Lean Six Sigma is a process improvement approach that uses a collaborative team effort to improve performance by systematically removing operational waste and reducing process variation. It combines Lean Management and Six Sigma to increase the velocity of value creation in business processes.

A glossary of terms relating to project management and consulting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Industrial engineering</span> Branch of engineering which deals with the optimization of complex processes or systems

Industrial engineering is an engineering profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information and equipment. Industrial engineering is central to manufacturing operations.

Total productive maintenance (TPM) started as a method of physical asset management, focused on maintaining and improving manufacturing machinery in order to reduce the operating cost to an organization. After the PM award was created and awarded to Nippon Denso in 1971, the JIPM, expanded it to include 8 Activities of TPM that required participation from all areas of manufacturing and non-manufacturing in the concepts of lean manufacturing. TPM is designed to disseminate the responsibility for maintenance and machine performance, improving employee engagement and teamwork within management, engineering, maintenance, and operations.

Theory of constraints (TOC) is an engineering management technique used to evaluate a manageable procedure, identifying the largest constraint (bottleneck) and strategizing to reduce task time and maximise profit. It assists in determining what to change, when to change it, and how to cause the change. The theory was established by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt through his 1984 bestselling novel The Goal. Since this time, TOC has continued to develop and evolve and is a primary management tool in the engineering industry. When Applying TOC, powerful tools are used to determine the constraint and reduce its effect on the procedure, including:

References

  1. ↑ "Focused improvement". informationquickfind.com. Retrieved 2015-11-02.
  2. ↑ "Focused Improvements for Management Methods". Mark Waldof Consulting LLC. Retrieved 2015-11-02.
  3. ↑ Adriana Bicego, Pieter Derks, Pasi Kuvaja, Dietmar Pfahl (1999). "Product Focused Process Improvement: Experiences of Applying the PROFES Improvement Methodology at DRÄGER". CiteSeerX   10.1.1.136.8336 .{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ↑ Oxton, Lee. "focused improvement «". www.kcts.co.uk. Retrieved 2015-11-02.
  5. ↑ www.tpmconsulting.org http://www.tpmconsulting.org/english_show.php?id=8 . Retrieved 2015-11-02.{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  6. ↑ Suzuki, T., Ed. (1994). TPM in Process Industries. Portland, OR, Productivity Press.Tajiri, M. and F. Gotoh (p.1992). TPM Implementation - A Japanese Approach. New York, McGraw Hill.
  7. ↑ Leflar, J. (2001) p.15. Practical TPM. Portland, OR, Productivity Press.
  8. ↑ Nakajima, S. (1988) p.19 Introduction to Total Productive Maintenance. Cambridge, MA, ProductivityPress.
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