Improvement teams: a neccesity for Continuous Improvement implementation. Evidence from Cantabria

Due to the characteristics of the current business environment, companies need to adopt efficient management systems that allow them to compete worldwide. This is the reason why continuous improvement has become a key issue for companies. Despite its relevance, many companies fail to implement continuous improvement initiatives. One reason may be the lack of practical research about how to implement continuous improvement. Taking this into consideration, and due to according to literature improvement teams play a key role when implementing continuous improvement, the aim of this paper is to analyse how companies use and implement improvement teams. Results show that a high percentage of companies practising continuous improvement have improvement teams. It is also concluded that, in most cases, members voluntarily offer to participate which is a really positive result. However, some problems such as lack of regularity or lack of operators´ involvement were also identified. We consider these results could be useful for those companies interested in implementing continuous improvement that can use them as a guide.

Keywords:

Continuous improvement , improvement teams , structure , kaizen