1 Introduction

In today's highly competitive environment, really successful organizations recognize the need not only to provide quality products or services, but also to keep on increasing the quality of these products and services so that they exceed customers' expectations. Organizations ignore the need to focus on quality, at a price customers can afford, at their peril.

So how, in practice, can an organization keep on increasing quality? The answer is through a commitment to a programme of continuous improvement, in which all staff are encouraged to make suggestions on how processes and consequently products and services can be improved. As a manager you have a vital role to play, not only in coming up with ideas yourself and encouraging your team to come up with ideas, but also in evaluating ideas and planning how they can be implemented.

In this session we will focus on what is involved in ensuring that continuous improvement goes beyond the ideas stage and becomes a reality.

2 What Does Continuous Improvement Involve?

The idea that organizations should aim to improve the quality of their products and services on a continuous basis was first taken up in Japan, where the word for continuous improvement is kaizen . It comes from a book published in 1986 entitled Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success, written by Masaaki Imai.