Breakthrough Improvements

Breakthrough improvements are major changes in processes that yield business-altering results. Continuous improvement, on the other hand, is the relentless attack on waste that makes companies get better at a steady pace.

A strong, improvement-oriented company will have both breakthrough improvements and a continuous improvement culture as part of its strategy to get better.

Companies should create a culture where each person sees part of their role being to improve their own job each and every day. And each manager should see it as part of his or her role to make his or her operation run better every day.

But achieving great gains also take a more focused effort to get past performance barriers. For that reason, as part of a good policy deployment effort, the company will set some stretch goals, also known as breakthrough objectives. These are the things that will make a significant difference in the company.

Breakthrough improvements are needed to meet those breakthrough objectives. Even kaizen events, week long, dedicated improvement projects, are not enough. These tend to yield outstanding, massive improvements, but the reach tends to be focused—maybe even to a single station on an assembly line.

Breakthrough improvements are far more wide-reaching. They tend to take dedicated project teams months to accomplish, and often require specific budgeting. They might include thing like bringing all plastic injection molded parts to in-house production with very low inventory. That project might take several kaizen events-perhaps setup reduction on several machines, and an event to develop a kanban system. It might also take a lot of small daily improvements or some traditional project management to put all the moving parts together.

But the distinguishing feature of a breakthrough objective is that the activity is coordinated towards meeting the breakthrough objective. The scope is also much bigger and the duration is much longer than typical continuous improvement efforts.