Best Practice - 4th Essential Factor - Education & Training 

Throughout my career I have created numerous courses, training materials, and taught classes on topics ranging from World Class Manufacturing practices, to technical workshops on production scheduling and MRP.  Other examples include a 20 course curriculum, containing over 1,000 presentation slides for an ERP system implementation project at a large Aerospace & Defense company.  We led the process of selecting and training the in-house training team that lead each of these classes and workshops, which eventually trained over 1,500 people.  It should come as no great surprise that the implementation went smoothly.

I have been consistently puzzled by the fact that at most of the companies I've worked with, plus dozens more that I've studied, simply do not spend any time or money on attempting to seriously improve the performance, skills, capabilities of their people.  Yet these otherwise intelligent leaders somehow expect the company's performance to improve - somehow.  How?

Improve the Improvement Process!   This article - part of the book on best practices focuses on crafting and Education & Training program that is specifically designed to support the continuous improvement process - that is, its people - and to thus in turn move the company forwards to greater performance, higher quality, and strong growth.  Article PDF.