Why it is Important to Make Continual Improvement as a Business Strategy in 2020?

[Manjeet Singh]

Continuous improvement is an ongoing process to improve the process, services, people, or products of an organization. Continuous improvement business strategy is also known as a continuous improvement process (CIP) or Continual Service Improvement (CSI). The improvements sought can be incremental over time or achieved with a breakthrough moment that tries to increase effectiveness and efficiencies to fulfill a company’s objectives.

In IT Service and Operation Management, delivery of key services with high availability, low cost, and high customer satisfaction are becoming key success metrics for CIOs strategy. The Services are delivered by a set of steps, called processes, and there is always room for improvement in the delivery of process and people involved.

In recent years, many companies have begun to make greater use of the creative potential in the minds of their employees and customers using ServiceNow Continual Improvement Management (CIM). The continuous improvement process plays an increasingly important role in the company because it allows to proactively drive continuous optimization across people/process/service/technology to increase business efficiency, innovation, and competitive advantage.

Benefits of using a continuous improvement business strategy

When constantly seeking improvement and evaluating the process, you find out areas of bottlenecks, inefficiencies, waste that were not part of the focus earlier. What happens as a result is a continuous reduction in operating overhead, saved time and money as you start to optimize different areas.

When you can find out whether process inefficiencies are likely to cause delays or outages, you can plan better and make proactive improvements to avoid those mishaps. You’re open to taking advantage of opportunities. This constant movement, if it’s tethered to a well-thought-out process, will reduce complacency and threats from the competition and will help make your company more innovative.

How to know when to apply a continuous improvement business strategy?

If you’re looking to save time and cost but keep up the quality of the product with great customer satisfaction, then a continuous improvement business strategy is a good way to manage that difficult balancing act. By looking for opportunities to improve business and then evaluating those changes, help form an effective strategy.

Some organizations are not set up to have their teams constantly practicing continuous improvement, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t take advantage of this useful strategy. For example, companies can schedule regular meetings to discuss ways to improve processes or enable the idea management module to let employees submit their improvement ideas at one single place for tracking and transparency. This will provide the feeling of being heard and needed, which has a significant influence on employee satisfaction and motivation.

Using CIM app for managing continuous improvement

CIM app gives you all the tools you need in one place to easily implement a continuous improvement strategy on the ServiceNow platform.

1. It enables collaboration from everyone in the organization from the top down by aligning improvement initiative to company strategy.
2. Involves employees in the continuous improvement process using idea module
3. Provide in-process coaching at critical moments leveraging Coaching Module
4. Benchmarks against peers to set better goals
5. Service Portfolio management to drive improvement at Service Level
6. Embedded analytics to find bottleneck and inefficiencies using trend charts
7. Show automated tracking ROI from your CIM efforts
8. A flexible framework that adapts to Kaizen, Six Sigma, OKR, Lean or Agile improvement methodologies.

How to assess if your corporate culture promotes CIM?

The following 8 questions are intended to help you assess whether your corporate culture promotes or hinders CIM. Assess the situation as realistically as possible.

Additional reading on CIM best practices and playbooks:

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=7ddf6bd0db1980142be0a851ca961950

CIM Podcast: https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=3de0295fdbf71f0067a72926ca96194a