What is continuous improvement? Google it and you will find a plethora of information on it. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_Improvement_Process) suggests the following: Continuous Improvement Process (CIP, or CI) is an ongoing effort to improve products, services or processes. These efforts can seek "incremental" improvement over time or "breakthrough" improvement all at once.
The question is, which is best? Should a company direct their efforts at incremental, or breakthrough improvements? This is perhaps a more difficult question to answer, as in most cases this would depend on the company's current situation. This is best explained by example.
My mother used to work as an estate agent, a career that required a lot of travelling away from the office to various different houses, and meeting different potential buyers at every meeting. To stay in contact, all the agents had long-range two-way radios. If the buyer wanted to see another property that was not prearranged, the agents could simply pick up the radio and contact the agency, who would arrange a meeting with the next home owner, and then confirm the appointment with the agent again by means of the radio. This worked very well and required a very efficient middleman (as many business processes still do today), but with the pros came a whole list of cons too. One of the largest issues was the lack of immediate feedback, and the resulting waste of time and resources. Today, this type of business is still on the go, and they have moved from radios, through beepers (pagers), to mobile phones. In this instance the improvement in communication was incremental.
However, if we consider another process in the estate agents business, show houses, a more drastic change took place in the age of the Internet. Few people would view a house nowadays without looking at it online first. This was a huge stride in saving time and resources. You can look at ten houses online in the time it would have taken you to visit a single house. This is more of a breakthrough type of improvement when one considers the lucky dip of show houses on the weekend, compared to the complex searching facilities of most property websites.
The better of the two solutions depends on many factors. The incremental approach in this example needed a lot of investment in devices that are no longer viable. The business still runs in the same manner, and even the receptionist still has a role to play in most offices. Although the business is more efficient, the results to the bottom line were not drastically influenced by the arrival of the mobile phone.
The breakthrough improvement has significant impact to the bottom line of this business. The Internet and its virtual house tours eliminated the need for estate agents to have offices and show houses. This savings in time and resources is phenomenal. This saving is surely what any business would like to achieve?
Continuous incremental improvement is certainly a prerequisite to survival in today’s competitive marketplace, but this type of improvement is the norm. To boldly influence the future path of your business, breakthrough improvements are essential.
So what does this mean for a laboratory? Simply put, continuous improvements on dated paper and Excel-based systems are only incremental. They result in slight improvements in productivity and efficiency, but in contrast, profitability remains largely unchanged.
However, implementing a complete laboratory information management system (LIMS) like QBCon's Lab-i system, which can be integrated with all instruments and accounting packages, would be a breakthrough improvement. The resulting change would have a drastic impact on the way the business runs and similarly have a huge positive impact on profitability. To find out more about what QBCon can do to improve your business systems and bottom line, contact to craft a unique solution for you.
Written by Lloyd Bekker on behalf of QBCon.
