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What Challenges Are You Facing?

By Ron Pereira Published on June 7th, 2011

A quick question… what challenges are you currently facing as it relates to building a culture of continuous improvement within your organization?

These challenges can be related to people, processes, or anything else in between.

Feel free to post anonymously if you’d like.

Ron Pereira

Ron has more than 20 years of experience in various manufacturing, supply chain, and senior leadership roles. Ron has held the titles of process engineer, engineering manager, master black belt, and director of manufacturing & continuous improvement. In 2002 Ron was the first American to win the Nokia Global Six Sigma and Overall Quality award in Helsinki, Finland. Ron holds a bachelor's degree in automated manufacturing and an MBA in technology management.

  1. George Watson

    June 7, 2011 - 1:36 pm
    Reply

    We’re pushing on a rope. Several of us want to change things but can’t get any power behind the push as the company is so focused on near term results. We had 2 kaizen events cancelled last month because there was no time to make bad processes faster. Quite the paradox isn’t it?

  2. Amy

    June 7, 2011 - 3:56 pm
    Reply

    We’re a Six-Sigma focused company and pretty much all projects are huge in scope and take forever to finish. We have some projects that have been going on for more than 14 months!

  3. M.

    June 7, 2011 - 11:14 pm
    Reply

    The old classic, “we’re too busy / don’t have enough time.”

    May I also add that we are spending an atrocious, criminal, sad, our-customers-would-fire-us amount of time just fixing problems. And not usually fixing them the right way.

    We are indeed far less Lean than we can even admit to ourselves.

  4. Anonymous

    June 8, 2011 - 8:39 am
    Reply

    Not enough support from management. They all talk about improvements, operating faster with less errors but no actions.

  5. MW

    June 8, 2011 - 10:15 am
    Reply

    Improvment:
    Open and Just Add Water!

  6. Suresh

    June 8, 2011 - 2:40 pm
    Reply

    Our biggest issue is maintaining gains. We do a decent job implementing but then seem to slide back a few months later.

    • Anonymous

      June 9, 2011 - 6:17 am

      The reason for the backslide is simply, the process is not being managed!

  7. Anonymous

    June 9, 2011 - 12:48 pm
    Reply

    All the above. Sounds like we are all in the same boat on this one. Hopefully we can plug a few holes before we sink!!

  8. Flor

    August 3, 2011 - 7:35 am
    Reply

    LOL!! I thought I was alone in the Continuous Improvement journey!

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