CIFMS

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The implementation of a CIFMS (Continuous Improvement and Focused Monitoring System) offers companies "quick wins" benefits, which enable them to produce high quality products with shorter lead-time.

Continuous improvement, in regard to organizational quality and performance, focuses on improving customer satisfaction through continuous and incremental improvements to processes, including by removing unnecessary activities and variations. Quality is a never ending quest and Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) is a never ending effort to discover and eliminate the main causes of problems. It accomplishes this by using small-steps improvements, rather than implementing one huge improvement. The Japanese have a term for this called "kaizen" which involves everyone, from the hourly workers to top-management.

A CIFMS is not a general software application that can be readily used for any given manufacturing company, it is a uniquely designed system specifically tailored to a given company guided by a method. Therefore the most crucial process in developing and implementing an efficient CIFMS is selecting a design method which brings forth a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDM) problem with varied degrees of interdependencies among the decision components (NB : the MCDM problem can be formulated so as to minimize the distance between a facility and a given set of points. The efficient points of this problem are candidates for optimal solutions to many location problems).

A key principle of an effective Continuous Improvement and Focused Monitoring System is input and feedback from a diverse group of stakeholders.


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