CI Changes from Suggestion Box to Organisational Learning

Continuous Improvement in Europe and Australia

Harry Boer, Anders Berger, Ross Chapman, Frank Gertsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138713703
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351772532
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This title was first published in 2000: A consideration of continuous improvement (CI) practice and performance. It brings together the results of a survey conducted simultaneously in a number of countries, with the express intention of building up understanding of how companies throughout the world are managing the process of implementing and, perhaps more importantly, sustaining, the process of CI. In so doing, the book offers a perspective on the similarities and differences of experience in a number of countries and sheds light on possible generic problems that managers throughout the world will have to grapple with if they are to take advantage of the true potential offered by their significant investments in human resources.

1	Introduction
	HARRY BOER, ANDERS BERGER, ROSS CHAPMAN, AND FRANK GERTSEN

Introduction

Continuous Improvement (CI), first defined and described in the USA, exported to and much improved in Japan, is now finding its way back to the West and is due to make its next step towards further perfection. There is plenty of literature on CI. However, most of this is Japanese or Western, mainly American, literature on kaizen, the Japanese form of CI. Relatively few authors have addressed the application of CI in other parts of the world. The purpose of this book is to close part of this gap. Based mainly on a survey conducted by the European Continuous Improvement Network (EuroCINet) and Australian research partners, the book describes the CI practices and experiences of over 1000 European and Australian companies and also analyses differences between European and Australian companies. Furthermore, the book puts these practices and experiences in their cultural and strategic contexts, and infers some major lessons for the theory and practice of CI management.

There are various definitions and conceptualisations of CI. For the purpose of the present book, CI is best understood in a broad sense, acknowledging also that the concept has grown ever broader over time, as the next section will show. In this book, CI is defined as the planned, organised and systematic process of ongoing, incremental and companywide change of existing practices aimed at improving company performance. This definition suggests that CI differs from other concepts, such as one of the other eye-catchers, Business Process Re-design (BPR), also known as Business Process Re-engineering. BPR also attempts to contribute to performance improvement, but does this through radical change and is usually not based on widespread involvement of employees. Other important differences between CI and BPR or other frame-bursting innovations are the much lower risk, cost and investment involved. However, this does not necessarily result in less radical performance improvements. The cumulative effects of successful CI implementation may generate dramatic improvement in company productivity and efficiency. CI, in other words, is about ‘unleashing the hundred-headed brain’, using all the innovative potential in the organisation in order to continuously improve the performance of the company, in the broadest sense. The key to CI is development and learning. Consider the following:

One or two children are tossing around with a ball. More children join in and the play turns into a match. Most children don’t have any clue of the rules of the game, no skills, no sense of tactics and team play; they simply enjoy the game and don’t get any payment other than a pat on the shoulder by their friends or parents.

Some years later, having become a member of a football club, the game has become more serious. The previously disordered group of children experiences what it is to play as a team. Their skills improve during training sessions as well as through learning by the experience of playing matches against other teams. After a first success, a championship, flowers, a medal perhaps, and a promotion to a higher league, the team have some trouble adjusting to the higher level, but they survive, and learn new technical skills and, in particular, improve their team skills. They start getting a sense of tactics. At this stage, the role of the coach is very important, not only at the training sessions but also during the matches, giving directions from the touchline. By and by the team improve, and at some stage they find themselves as champions of their country, which allows them to play in the champions league the next season. At that stage, there are still medals and a bunch of flowers, but football has become a profession and the team is paid quite well. A few years on, after some disappointing experiences the team has grown to an unbeatable squad of highly skilled, physically and psychologically strong professionals, who can read the game and are able to change tactics as and when required during the match, with very little coaching required.

After winning the champions’ league for the second time they manage to win the world championship after a thrilling match, in front of an excited crowd, in Japan …

This pattern, a group of school children playing football gradually evolving into a world-class team bears remarkable similarities with the development of CI:

• At the macro-level: the evolution of what started with some simple attempts to improve the performance of organisations to what seems to be the current concept of CI.

• At the micro-level: the way in which companies gradually learn to become a mature CI organisation.

This chapter starts at the macro-level. First, the historical roots of CI are sketched. Then, CI is put into the perspective of a wide range of changes taking place within and around companies, as well as other popular strategies of change and innovation, such as BPR. Next, shifting somewhat to the micro-level of CI implementation by individual companies, attention will be paid to some issues which have been presented previously as major barriers to the successful deployment of CI in (Western) companies. Following this background, the central theme of the book is presented. Subsequently, the European Continuous Improvement Network (EuroCINet) survey is introduced, which has provided the primary data for most of this book. Finally, after a brief discussion of the methodology used in the research, the remainder of the book is outlined.

The history of CI

Early accounts of CI

The earliest accounts of CI-related concepts go back at least as far as the 18^th century¹. One of the earliest recorded examples of the implementation of CI practices is the suggestion box implemented by the 8^th shogun, Yoshimune Tokugawa, in Japan, 1721. A British example is the scheme started in 1871 by Denny of Dumbarton, a Scottish shipbuilder who claimed that it was the first industrial system to invite and award ‘any change by which work is rendered either superior in quality or more economical in cost’. In order to unleash what he called ‘the hundredheaded brain’, John H. Patterson, founder and CEO of the American National Cash Register Company (NCR), started a suggestion, award and training system, around 1894. Other examples include the gradual implementation of an ‘incentive management system’ at Lincoln Electric Company, started in 1915 and refined over the subsequent decades (!), and a suggestion box system based on NCR’s system, at Kanebuchi Boseki, a Japanese textile firm, implemented in 1905.

The above examples (and many others) include suggestion boxes, award and training systems: and a variety of other mostly stand-alone attempts. These early approaches to the identification and analysis of improvement opportunities, and the development and implementation of solutions, were predominantly shop floor orientated, as opposed to the present concept of CI: an holistic, systemic, company-wide approach linked to company strategy. Yet, some key ingredients were in place.

Industrial Engineering-driven CI in America

A key factor in the ‘professionalisation’ of CI has been Frederick W. Taylor’s Scientific Management. Surprising, perhaps, to many who are less familiar with this approach to the scientific (re-)design of work processes, Taylor also recognised the need for CI and the involvement of the workforce therein. In 1912, he wrote:

You must have standards. We get some of our greatest improvements from the workmen in that way. The workmen, instead of holding back, are eager to make suggestions. When one is adopted it is named after the man who suggested it, and he is given a premium for having developed a new standard. So, in that way, we get the finest kind of team work, we have true co-operation, and our method … leads on always to something better than has been known before (Taylor, 1912, p. 55).

The slogan ‘work smarter, not harder’ coined by Frank Gilbreth, one of Taylor’s disciples, lies at the core of the invaluable contribution of the Scientific Management movement to the development of a wide range of methods to scientifically study, measure and analyse, design and improve work method, time and motion. Gilbreth’s ideas have provided the roots of the Japanese approach to Continuous Improvement which, however, developed rather differently to that in the USA (see e.g. Robinson, 1991).

Scientific Management soon led to the development of a new function in companies: Industrial Engineering, professionals who were responsible for setting standards, measurement of work using scientific methods for process, time and motion studies and improving the standards. The side-effect, not (wholly) intended by people like Taylor himself, Gilbreth or Gantt, who also championed the (re-)introduction of the worker in the improvement process (Gantt, 1901), was that the responsibility for determining work methods and standards shifted from the workers to the industrial engineers. To be sure, widespread, bottom-up involvement has always been advocated in the USA, as was teamwork. Examples of this include the so-called Scanlon plans, based on an idea from Joseph N. Scanlon, a union official, involving workers acting in groups to cut costs (Geare, 1976), and Lincoln’s belief in collective intelligence and experience as the cornerstone of excellent management. In practice, however, the most important factor was the industrial engineer. In most companies, the workforce was required to work and not to think. Sure, individual suggestions for improvement were invited and rewarded, but participation was not ‘compulsory’. Further analysis, solution and implementation were generally left to the industrial engineers, without any involvement from the workforce. CI never became a part of day-to-day life, except of course for the industrial engineers. This separation of doing and thinking led to disenfranchisement and de-skilling of the worker, and obvious disadvantages, in terms of commitment, involvement, motivation and industrial relations, and decreases in efficiency, productivity and quality. Yet, this approach towards CI or, as it was called then, rationalisation, has definitely contributed to the USA becoming the most powerful economy in the world between, say, the 1920s and the 1970s.

In 1958, not yet aware of what was happening in Japan, J.K. Galbraith even dared to write that ‘the production problem had been solved’ (Galbraith, 1958). It was this attitude that caused the name of the game to change in the 1960s, from developing, producing and marketing products to forming conglomerates and buying and selling entire companies. Consequently, manufacturing people rapidly made place for accountants and lawyers in the top management of companies and lost their role in the strategic debate. This explains at least part of the economic decline that hit the USA and also, though to a lesser extent, Europe, in the 1970s and 1980s. People like Skinner (1985), Abernathy (1982), Hayes and Wheelwright (1984), and Hill (1985) have vividly described the causes and consequences of that, as well as the solution: re-integration of manufacturing strategy in corporate strategy, in terms of both content and process.

The export of CI to Japan

America’s economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s can only partly be explained by its growing incompetence in the strategic management, innovation and change of (manufacturing) operations. At least as influential has been the post-war development in Japan, with an important role for CI. In a USA government-driven attempt to quickly rebuild Japanese industry, American concepts and practices were introduced into Japan by management experts like Lillian Gilbreth (Frank’s wife), W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran. Less known to many, but at least as important has been the wide range of training programmes, called the Civil Communication Section (CCS) seminars for top management, Training within Industry (TWI) for lower management, and the Management Training Program (MTP) for middle management (Robinson, 1991).

Among the subjects taught in the CCS were quality, leadership, teamwork, human relations, and coaching. TWI provided job instruction, job methods and job relations training, and was based on the teaching-the-teacher principle: ‘develop a standard method, then train people who will train other people who will train groups of people to use the method’ (Robinson, 1991, p. 14). Most important perhaps for the development of CI in Japan was the MTP. Building on the CCS and, in particular, the three TWI issues, the MTP taught the importance and techniques of continuous methods improvement. One of the subjects covered by the MTP was Scientific Management and, more particularly, Gilbreth’s motion study methods. Another subject was process control, the first step towards Total Quality Management, the systematic management of quality at all stages of the value-adding chain. Furthermore, the MTP is credited with playing a large role in introducing suggestion systems into Japanese industry and in triggering a more thoughtful attitude towards methods improvement. Thus, started in 1946 in the training of Japanese civilians employed by the occupying forces and taught for the first time to industrial and governmental managers in 1950, the MTP provided the basic principles of CI to the shattered Japanese economy. Further development of its principles by Japanese management created kaizen as the Japanese form of CI has become to be known after the publication of Masaaki Imai’s book: KAIZEN. The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success (Imai, 1986).

CI in Japan: kaizen

The exposure of Japanese management to the various training progr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the authors
• Foreword
• Executive summary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Continuous Improvement in the UK
• 3 Continuous Improvement strategies in the manufacturing sector in Sweden
• 4 Continuous Improvement in Norway
• 5 Continuous Improvement in the Netherlands
• 6 Continuous Improvement in Finland
• 7 Continuous Improvement in Denmark: the role of experience
• 8 Continuous Improvement strategies in the Australian manufacturing sector
• 9 Continuous Improvement in Europe and Australia. Do location and CI maturity make a difference?
• 10 Managing Continuous Improvement in different cultures
• 11 Continuous Improvement in the process of developing manufacturing strategy
• 12 Managerial implications and future directions
• References
• Appendix 1 Methodology and response profiles
• Appendix 2 EuroCINet survey questionnaire
• Appendix 3 EuroCINet survey database
• Appendix 4 Data and statistical calculations for Continuous Improvement and national culture analyses
• Appendix 5 About the EuroCINet