Is Your Continuous Improvement Program Too Complex?

What are the elements of your continuous improvement program?

How are they integrated? Or are they expected to be done separately without much guidance on what to do, leaving a complex approach with endless meetings?

As a result, is your organization too focused on the problem-solving process rather than being more focused on obtaining solutions?

Frito Lay, a wholly owned subsidiary of PepsiCo, was facing that problem.

They had several initiatives all aimed at continuous improvement that were competing for limited employee time and resources. This led to improvement processes becoming too complicated.

In addition to their original continuous improvement program, they added the following initiatives:

Autonomous Maintenance (Maintaining equipment)
Lean Six Sigma
Team 4Ward (Building high impact teams)

Upper level managers realized that each initiative had its own problem-solving process requiring more and more meetings to be held.

A team of field leaders developed a simplified continuous improvement model that integrated the best of all their improvement initiatives

While we don’t know what their CI Performance Model entailed, we can learn from their need to realistically integrate separate continuous improvement initiatives in order to simplify process improvement.

This is the video that Frito Lay senior executives used to communicate the need for the new model and to motivate problem-solving teams.