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"Process Improvement" is the series of steps taken to evaluate how things are done currently in order to achieve a "better" outcome. What is better? That depends. Better can mean cheaper, faster, more reliably, and with higher customer satisfaction to name a few goals. Process improvement seeks to identify what is most important to the customer receiving the product or service and then seeks to find ways to deliver that product or service in a consistently excellent way. We know that people make mistakes. In process improvement, we look for problems with the process that make mistakes likely or allow mistakes to go on un-checked.

Effective process improvement methods result in better products and services, which in turn result in greater customer satisfaction, employee morale, and bottom-line figures.

If you've never heard of process improvement, let me share a short story to illustrate just how effective process improvement can be in impacting the bottom-line.

Acme Co. makes widgets. Acme is rejecting 1% of their widgets due to defects. It's extremely obvious that Acme needs to do something to increase reliable delivery of product. Unfortunately, because of the high volume of defective products, the quality assurance department is overloaded. Defective product is constantly being delivered to customers. When Acme looks at the process of how the widget is made, they find out that the rubber they're using to produce their widgets is inadequate. They find that by using a different rubber that costs 1% more than what they're currently using, they see a 900% decrease in product defects. That means, instead of rejecting 1 of every 100 of their products, they're only rejecting 0.01% or one out of every 10,000 products. Quality assurance now has a much easier time doing their jobs, resulting in a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction. Profits increase rapidly due to the very low rejection rate, and employees really start to take pride in the product. This improvement leads to others helping the company make it to even higher levels of reliability. The net result in this case was a slight increase in spending on the supply side yielded a dramatic increase in profit margin, customer satisfaction, employee morale, and a new-found desire company-wide to learn how to not just do things right, but to make sure they're doing the right things.