An integrated structural model toward successful continuous improvement activity

This paper provides a different view from Bassent et al.'s (2001) toward a successful continuous improvement (CI) activity. Their concept encourages a business that is resting on its present accomplishments to seek greater gain. However, their behavioral model is not easy to operate for managers. In order to operate Cl activity effectively and obtain company-wide involvement for management, we need a system which can meet the current Cl status and lead the firm toward the correct road as described by Bessant et al. This system has to be open in the way that it can fit into any organization so that it can easily embed the necessary regenerative input into its physical structure. This system has also to be super in the way that it can successfully lead the organization structure toward the evolutionary route. Thus, we propose an open super system which places a pyramid composed by problem, models and tools, and promotion, at its core. Using Bessant et al.'s five evolutionary levels as a time map, this system can analyze a firm's improvement ability from the presentation of cases and find the proper regenerative input from the failure status. A firm can inject this input into its structure to upgrade its level of capability. Applying this open super system on our previous studies, we derived five improvement levels and the different ability types in each level. From there, we discovered some failure status in each level. We also drew some important perspectives on the injection of regenerative input from failure status, including the promotion of the technique-excellence ability, the value problem, and efficiently solving problem. To help the readers to understand this system better, we give 'AB two stage' system as an example to show how to inject regenerative input into the physical structure to fulfill the expectations from different perspectives. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.