IdeaWorks

Objective

The objective is to develop and foster a culture of Innovation culture/mindset throughout the organization; innovation would help the organization to be a step ahead in the competition.

Preface

Innovation is imperative for businesses to be continually delivering improved value proposition to clients.

In order for businesses to successfully establish a culture of innovation within the organization, certain key success factors have to be set in place and those supported by technology for enabling efficient implementation of the Innovation program within the organization.

Innovation - Business need

Innovation can be defined as the process of introducing new ideas, products, or methods.

In a high competitive business environment, customers have several options of suppliers to choose from leading to constantly raising the bar on product features, quality and cost. Businesses that face challenge in keeping pace in the rapidly evolving market space would fall behind.

Successful businesses are those that proactively work in developing a product with reduced cost and improved quality, and pass on the value to the customers and keep delighting them consistently. This is made possible in these organizations by implementing a culture of innovation. These businesses thrive in the challenging business environment of today and by delivering improved value to customers by using Innovation to build competitive advantage.

Embarking on Innovation

For building an efficient cost structure, the cost contribution of the various steps within the processing are reviewed to identify ways of reducing redundant steps, improving productivity, and improving controls for defect reduction.

These process simplifications activities can be embarked upon by every team member on the production floor that performs the day to day processing activities. These team members are the best source of idea generation, as they are hands-on with the processing and can review the processing and identify better ways of performing their roles. They can come up with ideas for process improvement that can offer incremental benefits over the existing processing steps. These improvement ideas are called Kaizens.

Kaizen – Improvement or "Change for the best"

Kaizen refers to practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in any sphere – manufacturing, engineering, service or any processes. The identified idea when implemented continuously improves all functions and involves all employees for achieving greater goals.

IdeaWorks is a platform within PeopleWorks that is aimed at collecting and channelizing the business ideas within the organization. IdeasWorks tracks and manages ideas submitted by individual employees to its completion. The progress is tracked using Kaizen techniques and the data is recorded for future use.

The advantages of IdeaWorks can be described as follows:

•  Online submission and review of ideas.

•  Outline the user roles based on their job function.

•  Retain project-related documentation.

•  Generate reports.

• Send automated e-mails at frequent intervals to multiple stakeholders about the status of the ideas or kaizen projects.

Depending on their job role, IdeaWorks has interfaces for the employee, mentor and coordinator and administrator.

Stakeholders in the Kaizen implementation process

Kaizen Mentors

Kaizen Mentors belong to a leadership group that has undergone training in Kaizen methodologies and mentoring. Their role is to mentor Kaizen projects done by junior employees. They review  the ideas and provide guidance to employees throughout the course of the project.

Kaizen Coordinators

Kaizen Coordinators (or Business Excellence team members) are senior personnel in the organization and belong to the leadership group. They have worked in multiple departments and have a deep understanding of these processes. Their main role is to review  the submitted ideas and determine the feasibility of implementing these ideas.

Kaizen Life-cycle

The Kaizen lifecycle includes kaizen idea generation, idea submission to mentor, idea approval by mentor, Kaizen idea implementation, change management to ensure new processing steps is shared to all team members, gain their acceptability to implement the proposed processing steps going forward, new process sustained, quantify benefits accrued through efficient processing, and finally sign off the kaizen idea implementation. If these Kaizen idea implementation steps are not followed with rigor then oftentimes the idea implementation process does not succeed in establishing Innovation as a culture within the organization.

Kaizen idea implementation process is a high coordination intensive process with multiple hand-off from the Idea generation stage to Idea implementation sign-off stage.

Leverage Technology for the administration of Innovation

The program is best implemented by leveraging technology. The technology solution such as the IdeaWorks module in PeoleWorks would simplify the administration of the Innovation program by tracking and guiding the progress of the Kaizen idea implementation process. The tool would ease the administration, allow visibility of the progress of the implementation to Mentors & Coordinators, and guide the workflow of idea implementation process.