Evaluating Improvement Ideas

It’s always beneficial to have many ideas for suggestions and improvements, but what do you do with those ideas to decide which one is best? There are two major factors to consider: the difficulty of making the changes, and the cost of implementation. These two factors are considered together to work out the potential payback in terms of quality, cost, and delivery (QCD).

In order to identify the rankings of each factor and to help you prioritise the improvement ideas, you can use a simple matrix, with level of payback on the x-axis and level of difficulty along the y-axis, moreover, ideas in the top left quadrant would be implemented first, as they provide the biggest payback with the least difficulty. Each of the two factors are rated between one and five. Lastly, it is essential that there is team involvement to get a balanced view. 

Once the root cause of a problem is established, goals can be set to provide improvement, these goals must be quantified, and in the form of SMART objectives. As always, these goals are agreed after a full discussion and consensus by the team, then an action plan can be made that allows the monitoring of the plan; this also helps to spot any deviation from the plan. 

Once again, the plan is made using SMART objectives, so when it’s completed, the team can compare the end result with initial measurements to assess the success of the improvement. 

In order to measure competitiveness of a business, you must look at quality, cost, and delivery performance (QCD) of a company. This can be measured using the following indicators: not right first time, delivery schedule achieved, people productivity, stock turns, overall equipment efficiency, value added per person, and floor space utilisation.

Learning Objectives:
•Identify how evaluating ideas for improvement can be conducted
•Examine how you can establish the rankings of each factor
•Assess and distinguish between the indicators that are used to measure competitiveness