Regardless of industry, today’s consumer-centric world requires organizations to challenge the status quo and move into a new way of looking at how to better deliver products and services.

A business can only go so far in its race to bottom-line pricing; the key is to find differentiators that deliver increased customer value. There’s no better way to achieve this than through reengineering and optimizing your organization’s business practices.

Continuous process improvement, sometimes referred to as Lean Six Sigma and Design for Six Sigma, offers an ongoing improvement program that can define how an organization embraces change. The principles of Lean were first applied to automotive manufacturing in the U.S., but refined by the Japanese after World War II. Toyota Motor Company recognized that workers had much more to offer than just muscle, and initially experimented with Quality Circles. Eventually, this was distilled into principles that improved process and quality control to increase productivity.

Today, continuous improvement principles are at the heart of organizations across the economic strata. In the financial services industry, we successfully introduced Kaizen principles, which eliminate waste in the workplace, to a national bank struggling with the timely submittal of Currency Transaction Reports (CTR). These reports are required for any transaction over $10,000 — and there are hefty fines leveraged by U.S. regulators for not submitting them quickly. The bank’s overly manual CTR system created paper-intensive, inefficient and cumbersome processes that left the organization at significant risk.

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