Process Improvement Foundations

- Process improvement is about taking the core of what you do, whatever it is that your company sells in order to make a profit, measuring it, and then finding ways to do it better. Doing it better could mean doing it more cheaply, or doing it faster, or achieving better quality, or all of these at once. Improving your processes will make your company more profitable, and might be essential for your survival in a competitive world. And even though every company, every business is different, there are certain techniques that could be used to investigate the potential improvement of any process.

I'm Chris Croft, and on this course, I'll be taking you through measuring what you've got at the moment, working out whether it's good enough, the trade-off between cost, time, and quality, whether it really does cost more to produce better quality, understanding queues and lead time, the importance of bottlenecks, and several more of my favorite theories. Some of these theories make up the main parts of Lean and Six Sigma, although this course doesn't cover all of those subjects.

I've taken what I feel are the best bits, the most interesting and most useful ones, and put them into this course. I started out my working life as a production engineer, and later went on to be a university lecturer in operations management, as well as taking an MBA. And this course condenses all of the most interesting and useful theories from operations and quality management into a little over an hour. So, I hope you enjoy it, as well as finding it useful. By the end, you'll have a deeper understanding of how systems work, and a whole lot of practical tools that you can use when you're improving your own processes.

So, let's get started.