As vice president of quality for a $1.5 billion industrial corporation, Hermann Miskelly is responsible for leading its continuous improvement effort. Now in his tenth year of implementing Lean Six Sigma, he has overseen the execution of more than 4,000 major improvement projects and another 6,000 smaller improvement projects. Here are three key insights he shared about managing continuous improvement projects with the help of Minitab Engage.

Optimize your management system

You don’t just need to execute improvement projects. You need to improve the way you manage them.

“Across our operations and business units, these [Excel] spreadsheets were requiring over 120 man-hours per month to gather, analyze, and prepare monthly executive reviews of the continuous improvement effort,” Miskelly says. “Overall, our management system was slow, cumbersome, and labor-intensive, and we were looking for a better way to execute and manage our continuous improvement effort.”

It’s important to have a management tool that makes day-to-day project management easy and allows you to quickly report on your progress for strategic alignment with key executives. Wasting time collecting data from different reports in different internal systems takes you away from driving the change that matters.

Optimize learning

Spend less time learning new tools or software – whether implementing a new process or onboarding a new employee.

“With the new Minitab Engage software system, all of that effort essentially disappears. Individual projects are executed using the desktop project management portion of Minitab Engage. Because it’s similar to the old Minitab Engage, the learning curve for our Green Belts and Black Belts was minimal. Custom forms used for initial project approval and final project review have been integrated into a standard template, further simplifying project management.“

Ease of control of results

Miskelly says Minitab Engage’s dashboard feature has most improved the company’s ability to manage large numbers of projects.

“No longer do they have to gather and analyze spreadsheets at the end of the month, our operations and business unit leaders can analyze their continuous improvement efforts as a whole and, if necessary, drill down into individual projects. The dashboard allows them to track project information—counts, starts, completions, delays, etc.—and financial information, such as projected savings versus actual savings, in real time. Operations and business leaders can now focus on analyzing progress and identifying opportunities for new projects…. Once again, Minitab has studied and listened to its customers, and delivered a product that solves our continuous improvement problems.“

Source: Minitab

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