This is the practice of identifying and implementing changes to existing business processes. These changes might optimize the efficiency or performance of these processes, by minimizing waste, costs, or risk, or improving the user experience for staff or customers.

Operational Excellence is an approach to the improvement of business processes with cultural transformation at its core. It involves an examination of both people and process to identify how and why employees are working the way they do. Once these questions become clear, the next step is to adapt those processes in order to optimize their efficiency and efficacy.

Performance Excellence is an approach to continuous improvement based on the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. It assesses performance holistically, through the prism of seven key areas: Leadership, Strategy, Workforce, Customers, Operations, Knowledge Management, & Results. While Operational Excellence is primarily concerned with procedure, this concept takes a more comprehensive approach to making improvements by covering each of these seven areas in turn.

The first and most obvious obstacle to continuous improvement is finding ideas. If you don’t have enough ideas for ways to optimize your product, process, or service, then you should consider involving a larger audience in your program. It’s equally important to ensure your audience is consistently engaged and motivated to put forward new ideas.

On the other hand, if you have too many suggestions for improvements, then it can be difficult to decide which ones should be implemented. To achieve this, you’ll need to establish an efficient evaluation process, ideally involving features designed to make this easier for you, such as automation and crowd voting. 

Once you’ve identified which improvements to take forward, one major challenge remains: implementing them effectively. If your new improvement or best practice needs to be adopted by 10,000 front line workers across your company, then you need to ensure you have an engaging way to communicate to them and track the process. For this purpose, you usually need a dedicated tool.

Historically, front-line employees have not been given many opportunities to contribute towards continuous improvement initiatives. Yet these workers often have invaluable knowledge gained from extensive experience working with your products, services, and processes.

While these workers might have less hands-on experience with the day-to-day operation of your business, they have technical expertise and knowledge that can be just as useful. It’s often really easy for these teams to access and use the digital platforms used for continuous improvement.

This is usually the largest audience available to any company, and one that offers great potential for continuous improvement. Your customers sometimes know your products and their pain points even better than your employees, and they always appreciate the opportunity to have their voice heard.

In many cases, the best way to catch the attention of your stakeholders is to get creative with a unique reward. This could be as simple as a dedicated parking space, or a lunch meeting with your CEO. These kinds of rewards can often be just as attractive as financial ones.

One of the best things about continuous improvement is that the benefit it brings is often easily quantified. Because of this, many companies are able to justify rewarding contributors with cash bonuses or gifts. This can be a set amount for a specific challenge, or it can be based on the ROI an improvement has generated after implementation.

The old-school suggestion box is the original solution used by most companies in the pre-internet era, and it remains a popular (but basic) tool for gathering ideas. Over the years, the suggestion box has led to countless wins for companies who’ve used them, but its weaknesses lie in the time and effort required to process large numbers of ideas manually.

Nowadays, there are an endless number of digital tools that enable businesses to carry out a basic submission process. Several organizations attempt to design their own tools from scratch, and some have been successful. However, DIY tools like these often fail to have the functionality and flexibility needed to be an effective solution for large-scale organizations.

Business process management software (BPMS) is a solution that helps organizations to design, manage and automate various tasks and processes. It can help to make those processes more efficient by speeding up and optimizing them. As a result, employees have more time to dedicate to more challenging work.

These are solutions that have been built from the ground up specifically to help businesses implement effective continuous improvement programs at scale. There aren’t many solutions dedicated to continuous improvement – idea management platforms or other tools are often used. The solutions that do exist vary in terms of price, sophistication and flexibility, but they all offer a platform with a range of features to help organizations gather, evaluate, and implement ideas for continuous improvement.