Seeking Suggestions for Next Phase of CI Growth

How is your CI program structured?
We are a team of 4 and one of those 4 is our leader. We currently have an opening for one of the positions.

How many dedicated CI resources do you have, and are their roles solely CI-focused or shared with other day-to-day responsibilities?
We are dedicated resources for the business. Now that being said we may do tasks outside the normal CI focus, but we like to lead, and problem solve with the business to accomplish our corporate goals.

How do you manage CI awareness, communication, and training?
We have a Lean Management Systems training that we introduce to all new leaders. Communication and awareness are not an intentional focus right now, but we are changing that. Our business partners generally share our story to the rest of the business, and we share it to our upline. We work closely with the business and when they tell their improvement story they say they partnered or collaborated with us. If they don’t our leader makes sure our upline knows we were involved in that effort.

I would love to discuss more, but I hope this helps.

Jason

How is your CI program structured? We have recently adapted a system similar to Toyota Production System (TPS). There are foundational elements that we are working on Management Operating System (MOS), Food Safety & Quality, and People Safety. Once those bases are established, we’ll be working on standing up the pillars of the system.

How many dedicated CI resources do you have, and are their roles solely CI-focused or shared with other day-to-day responsibilities? At our location, we have one dedicated resource (facilitator) to help guide our location thru the jungle of our production system. But the culture of CI is part of all of our responsibilities.

How do you manage CI awareness, communication, and training? Addressing the CI awareness and communication first.
our system has a constant auditing program built in where members are expected to grade/rate and provide feedback to elements of our system. Example: at a daily production meeting, there’s a meeting template that spell out participants, inputs, outputs, & purpose. Someone within that group may audit the meeting. Within that audit there will be grading based on behaviors, did everyone show up on time?, we’re they prepared? were the correct KPI’s discussed? were actions taken to correct gaps in KPI’s?
The training question, I’m not sure if you mean for the CI person or just training in general but here’s my opinion on training. For CI people, training is important for them to have a solid understanding of what CI tools to use and when. Just Do It, Plan,Do,Check,Act, DMAIC and so on. For the masses, I’m not 100% sold that CI training is effective and/or necessary. My experience has been if one tool is introduced in training, let’s say DMAIC, then every issue that comes up gets run through the DMAIC process when the majority of them don’t need to be. That can turn people off pretty fast when they don’t see results. Another thing I’ve seen with training the masses, is some people tend to be more worried about making sure the form in filled out than actually solving the issue. This leads to my last opinion on CI. Doesn’t really matter what acronym or Japanese word one uses to describe CI tools the process is all the same: You are at point A and you want to be at Point B, in the way are obstacles, some known and some unknown, and how do you get through them to achieve the desired results. Thanks for bringing up the questions and reading until the very end.