Even during my time as a quality manager at our Recklinghausen location, I worked on improving our quality standards and eliminating quality problems to increase customer satisfaction and reduce internal manufacturing costs using continuous improvement and the methods behind it.
In 2017-2023, I worked full-time as a Continuous Improvement Manager for Central Europe with plants in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic.
The main aim here is to optimize processes and workflows and to document them systematically and to expand them to other areas, plants or, if necessary, company-wide.
Unfortunately, my experience here has shown that it does not work with a rigid, implemented system, but that each project is rolled out individually, preferably by the original initiator, or is strongly supported. Otherwise, many solutions in other areas or locations do not work and this greatly weakens the Continuous Improvement idea and it very quickly loses the original idea and support.