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A Note on Continuous Improvement
Question of the month: What is the difference between continuous and continual improvement?
After a series of articles about the Road to Six Sigma in October, we talked some more about control charts and statistical process control (SPC) in November. We also launched the Policies, Procedures and Processes Blog in November and gave you a little background information about it.
Continuous Improvements with Control Charts
SPC is a great tool to not only monitor the current and recent behavior of a process, but is also a great tool to support Continuous Improvement activities. Once a sufficient amount of data has been collected and a good picture is obtained, several very useful pieces of information are available. Continuous improvement teams look at control limits and process variation to see if there may be opportunities to reduce routine or common cause variation
Read more about continuous improvements and control charts;
Blogging Policies and Procedures
With the primary aim of making it easier for web visitors like you to access our rich collection of articles, we launched the Policies, Procedures and Processes Blog in November. We took the blog project as a process improvement opportunity and implemented it on the basis of your inputs.
Read more about policies and procedures blog;
It is estimated that 70,000 blogs are created everyday in the web sphere. Approximately 19 million blogs that Technorati, the well-known blog directory, tracks generate one million posts daily. The popularity of blogs lie in the informal channel of communication, knowledge sharing and learning opportunity they provide.
Traking information in blogs have become very easy with RSS feed readers – aggregators that show information based on your preferences. With many internet users having online accounts with services like Yahoo or Google, it is very convenient to add blog feeds to constantly alert you when a given blog has new posting(s). Our idea in creating this blog was also based on this easy way of information flow – making it easy for you to access information related to policies, procedures and processes.
On That Note
Answer to this month’s question:
Continuous refers to a single, uninterrupted, non-stop event. Continual, on the other hand, refers to a series of finite events. Continuous improvement has often been cited as one of the goals of a Quality Management System; however, in the real world, it is not possible to continuously improve anything or any process. Improvement comes about through observation, measurement, and analysis, all discrete, finite processes. That is why section 8.5.1 of ISO 9001 is entitled Continual Improvement.
This question was posted in our blog by a reader. The blog is meant to be a forum to comment on articles and ask (and answer) relevant questions. We will respond to these comments and urge other readers to do the same.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments. Also, please let us know if you’d like any specific topic addressed in our future articles.
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January 31st, 2008 at 11:56 am
Hi,
I was interested in the thoughts placed above upon continuous vs continual. My understanding is that the references made to continual and not continuous in the ISO documents are somewhat contradictory to what Deming first suggested with regards the two terms, and that it should also be more in line with the Kaizen approach – combining this with thoughts of Krispin and de Lange in the late 90s is that Continual is non-stop and refers to the PROCESS of improvement, and continuous is complementary to discontinuous or innovative and this refers to the STRUCTURE of improvement – hence continuous is part of continual improvement, as is discontinuous improvement, continual referring to the whole process. Regards. Dr Kevin Owen