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Continuous Improvement... and TRIZ

While the term “Continuous Improvement” is thrown around with reckless abandon, I find that few quality professionals have a good understanding of it.

The Quality "Whac-A-Mole"

Let's assume that you regularly ride a bicycle on warm summer days. However, on one particular day, your front tire hits a small stick at an awkward angle causing you to fall from your bicycle and break your arm. After your arm is healed, you return to that spot where you fell, and sweep that specific area clear of any small sticks that may have fallen, or been blown by the wind, from nearby trees.

Would you consider that to be continuous improvement? Some quality professionals would say yes… pointing to the stick as the “root cause” of the problem. But in reality, small sticks and stones appear randomly throughout the bike path. This is called a “Common Cause” variation inherent within the activity of riding along bike trails.

Far too many quality professionals fail to differentiate between “Common Cause” and “Special Cause” variations in a process.

Whac-A-Mole Arcade Game

By incorrectly treating “Common Cause” variations as “Special Cause” variations, the result resembles the 1976 arcade game, “Whac-A-Mole” (where moles pop up from their holes at random, and the player earns points by forcing them back into their hole through hitting them directly on the head with a mallet). In the end, nothing is accomplished… but the player has a false sense of accomplishment reflected by their score.

In the quality profession, a very large number of nonconformities are addressed through the corrective action process… WITHOUT consideration as to whether the issue was a “Common Cause” or “Special Cause” variation in a process. By treating “Common Cause” variations as “Special Cause” variations, there is no “real” improvement (much like “Whac-A-Mole”). However, the quality team “feels” good (a false sense of accomplishment) about the apparent (short term) success of each corrective action.

Through understanding “Common Cause” vs “Special Cause” variations in a process still cling to CI, Through understanding and adjusting their approach to addressing process issues, by first determining whether the issue is a “Common Cause” or “Special Cause” variation, actual process improvements can be realized

CI and Optimization

When radio first appeared, the signal had to be manually adjusted for optimal reception. During the mid-twentieth century, Automatic Frequency Control (AFC), also called Automatic Fine Tuning (AFT), was introduced allowing the radio circuitry to automatically keep a resonant circuit tuned to the frequency of an incoming radio signal. It was primarily used in radio receivers to keep the receiver tuned to the frequency of the desired station.

In radio communication, AFC is needed because, after the bandpass frequency of a receiver is tuned to the frequency of a transmitter, the two frequencies may drift apart, interrupting the reception. This can be caused by a poorly controlled transmitter frequency, but the most common cause is drift of the center bandpass frequency of the receiver, due to thermal or mechanical drift in the values of the electronic components.

During the 1970s, receivers began to be designed using frequency synthesizer circuits, which synthesized the receiver's input frequency from a crystal oscillator using the vibrations of an ultra-stable quartz crystal. These maintained sufficiently stable frequencies that AFC's were no longer needed.

At that point, the radio tuning process had been “optimized” using the available technology.

No other improvements appear to be possible… using current technology.

This takes us into a separate realm of “improvement” involving “innovation”. And TRIZ.

TRIZ: Levels of Innovation

A HUGE barrier to improvement is “technical contradictions”. These are limitations or barriers encountered when using traditional improvement approaches and tools. To overcome “technical contradictions”, we need a new set of tools.

TRIZ consists of 5 levels of innovation

  1. Quantitative improvement of the existing function/principle (e.g., to reinforce a building, its walls are made thicker).
  2. Qualitative improvement of the existing function/principle (e.g., merging an alarm clock and CD-player).
  3. Extending a known function/principle combination to a new market (e.g., extending the function “to see through”, based on the principle “x-ray emission” from medical purposes (medical market) to different applications within different markets, such as destructive testing).
  4. Creating a new function/principle combination (e.g., the first radio transmitter or Ebay.com).
  5. Discovering a new principle (e.g., through creating new scientific knowledge, such as x-rays or the photo-voltaic effect).

For example, the Stirling Engine, a 200 year old idea, is finding new applications / markets (as a Level 3 Innovation).

How a Single Swedish Submarine Sank a US Aircraft Carrier

How the Stirling Engine actually works in a submarine

More: Modern Uses of Stirling Engines