Continuous Process Improvement

Quality is a never ending quest and Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) is a never ending effort to discover and eliminate the main causes of problems. It accomplishes this by using small-steps improvements, rather than implementing one huge improvement. The Japanese have a term for this called kaizen which involves everyone, from the hourly workers to top-management.
CPI means making things better. It is NOT fighting fires. Its goal is NOT to blame people for problems or failures. . . it is simply a way of looking at how we can do our work better. When we take a problem solving approach, we often never get to the root causes because our main goal is to put out the fire. But when we engage in process improvement, we seek to learn what causes things to happen and then use this knowledge to:

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