Net.CARs - Process improvement tool or suggestion box?
The pursuit of quality. The quest for a competitive edge. Whatever you call it, chances are that you, like most other executives, are continually searching to improve your organization.
You'd like to tackle the highest priority issues first. But how can you identify which ones will produce the biggest impact on your bottom line for the least allocation of resources?
For the answer, turn to the people who know your business best: your employees. They know which processes tend to frustrate them and waste their time. You can put that knowledge to work for you, whether informally, through an online "suggestion box," or formally, through a process improvement program in which your employees report process failures as they occur. Either way, Enlighten.Net has a tool to help: Net.CARs.
Net.CARs makes process improvement easier
The word CARs is short for Corrective Action Reports, a proven tool in quality circles. If you have a formal quality improvement program, Net.CARs is a perfect vehicle to give you data on process failures.
If you've been teaching your employees to question everything they do or see in terms of process improvements, it will be simple to train them to "CAR" (i.e., submit a Corrective Action Report about) anything that wastes time or money or that makes their job more difficult than necessary.
Net.CARs makes it easy, because they can report problems right from their PCs.
You may want to use Net.CARs in a less official way, more as a suggestion box...but why not go for the full power of the program?
What do I do with the data?
CARs categorizes the data entered to help you set priorities about which internal problems to address first. Reports print to your screen (or to your intranet, if you are using Net.Reports). From there you can use the information to identify the root causes of your process failures so you can begin to solve them.
At Enlighten.Net Inc., we've been using CARs for several years. We assign a manager to each process category to monitor all entries.
Each month, our managers discuss the top three categories (easily identified from the Summary Report) and take steps to analyze the causes, and to suggest and implement solutions.
Managers also assign owners to problems that are ongoing but that don't make the "top three". Sometimes, we form committees to address larger problems that cross departments. And sometimes, fixing a problem is just a matter of getting the information to the right person—instead of grumbling about it at the water cooler.
For a CARs program to work, it's important to give employees the incentive to get in the habit of entering reports. So when a problem is solved, take the time to publicize it and celebrate! Let your employees know that reporting process failures can change their jobs for the better.