Opportunities to Change and Improve

Question of the month: How does innovation contribute to change?

After talking about change in April, we turned our attention in May to three companies that successfully embraced change and made it part of their continual process improvement. Many improvement opportunities mandate that you look at the situation a little differently and try to make it better with a different and innovative approach.

Lean and Mean: A Competitive Advantage

Precoat Metals, a leading provider of metal coating services, has always been focused on serving customer needs, but the demands of a rapidly changing market place were starting to put a strain on their manufacturing capabilities. The problem was that, even though Precoat had a continuously running production line capable of changing coating types and colors on the fly, they were not able to conduct change-overs as fast as they wanted.

Read more about Precoat Metal’s Lean Approach;

They’ve Got Power at CTMT

CTMT is one of the nation’s most successful real estate and facility management companies, but their responsibilities at a data center facility for a prominent finance company in St. Louis exceeded the usual management company’s duties.  For this important client, CTMT had to meet very strict requirements in order to prevent power outages and mechanical failures, as well as reduce human error. 

Read more about CTMT’s Quality Journey;

Are You Realizing Your Potential

Ram Jack Foundation Systems, an internationally recognized structural repair company, has developed innovative ways to repair foundations and to stop or prevent structural damage. Their plan for growth focused on creating distributorships that leverage their innovative products and techniques for construction and foundation repair. But, how could Ram Jack maintain its revenue growth and realize their full potential?

Read more about Ram Jack’s Approach to Growth;

How quickly are you reaching your goals?  Sometimes it can take an objective and expert third party to help you challenge your assumptions and assist you in reevaluating your mission and strategy, just like a good college coach can help the high school athlete take his or her skills to the next level.  Bizmanualz can help you to focus on doing the right things right.

Training classes from Bizmanualz are designed to help you and your organization embark on your own process improvement programs. Whether you want to create well-defined processes, align people with organizational processes, implement process improvement programs or enhance your auditing skills, there’s a Bizmanualz Training Class that is right for you.

On That Note

Answer to this month’s question:

Innovation is all about thinking outside the box; looking at things from a different perspective. Certain prevailing problems or opportunities may not even be visible unless you are willing to take a step back and review the situation differently. It is with this added ability to recognize opportunities, that you find opportunities to change—for the better.

So, innovation and change really are like two sides of a coin. You can’t innovate without changing and you cannot change without innovation. One definitely feeds the other. This is where the three companies you read about were successful in recognizing improvement opportunities and implementing improvement programs.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments. Our policies, procedures and processes articles site has tons of useful information. Also, please let us know if you’d like any specific topic addressed in our future articles.

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Posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 under Monthly Summary

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Originally published by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title Opportunities to Change and Improve.

This and more articles like this can be found at www.bizmanualz.com. This article may be reprinted freely as long as this resource box is left intact.