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Market pressures, technological disruption, and process related challenges adversely affect organizational performance, and force the organizations to continuously refine, reduce costs, and perform better. Eventually, they start exploring the possibilities of implementing continuous process improvement or other innovation methodologies.
Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) involves improving a product, service or process, either incrementally or revolutionally. However, process improvement isn’t a one-time engagement, rather, it runs continuously, necessitating the need to evolve constantly. CPI initiatives assist the executives analyze workplace systems and procedures, and transform those to improve efficiency and productivity. For instance, Business Process Re-engineering, Lean Six Sigma, and Theory of Constraints are all different methodologies to enable organized transformation and promote a culture of thinking and upgrading.
Likewise, Process Innovation assists the organizations in encouraging innovative thinking and ideas testing using prototyping and multiple rounds of validation. Through process innovation, organizations work out an existing problem or execute a business process in a unique way to enhance efficiency and performance. Creating completely different workflows for an existing production process that accelerates production—by saving organizational resources, e.g., money and time—is an example of process innovation. Process Innovation is distinct from Continuous Improvement, in that, it generates marked or game-changing improvement in value, sometimes in the range of 50 to 100%, or even more. Whereas continuous or incremental improvements generate limited value.
However, Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) and Innovation alone aren’t enough to tackle today’s challenges. A more effective approach to drive transformational change is combining these 2 powerful organizational tools in the form of “Continuous Process Improvement and Innovation” (CPI2). The CPI2 approach executes vital incremental changes and introduces new tools and techniques to drive innovation and enable transformative disruption. CPI2 framework encompasses 6 core elements that set organizations up for long-term success:
By employing CPI2 companies can train their employees to think about problems differently and ingrain creativity needed to thrive in the evolving market. Implementing CPI2 facilitates in developing innovative ideas into change initiatives. This is achieved by executing sustainable process improvements—both incremental and transformational—engaging diverse teams to communicate with the entire value chain, and embedding an innovation culture in the organization.
The CPI2 approach perfectly blends Continuous Process Improvement tools and Innovation methodologies to assist the organizations analyze viable solutions and establish their strategic fit. Furthermore, the CPI2 framework helps nurture shared ideation among internal and external stakeholders—such as, leaders, employees, customers, and partners—and creates new organizational capabilities.
The CPI2 approach involves 4 phases of activity designed to discern and resolve organizational challenges:
Let’s now discuss the first 2 phases of the CPI2 approach.
The first phase of CPI2 involves defining the scope of the challenge and recognizing opportunities to meet the requirements. During this stage, the senior leadership establishes and confirms the aspirations from the engagement. The program stakeholders, teams, and roles and responsibilities are outlined. Utilizing tools and techniques—such as Voice of the Customer and Maturity Assessment—the future state of the organization and success parameters are defined and agreed. The CPI2 Maturity Assessment assists in obtaining top management’s sponsorship for the engagement and steers team-based workgroups.
In the Discover phase, the CPI2 team embark on assessing and mapping the existing organizational practices, processes, and ways of doing business. They work towards setting up a problem solving ecosystem that empowers employees to control and improve the results of their work by incorporating customer experience, feedback, and needs. The team conducts quantitative and qualitative analysis of the “As-Is,” identifying any gaps and unfulfilled needs; and evaluate the environment, values, and experiences. By employing Innovation methodologies like “Crowd Sourcing”, the CPI2 team gathers information from process or service users, prioritize initiatives to improve critical areas, and line up people to develop solutions.
Interested in learning more about the phases of the Continuous Process Improvement and Innovation (CPI2) framework? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Continuous Process Improvement and Innovation (CPI2) here on the Flevy documents marketplace.
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