What is Continuous Process Improvement (CPI)?
CPI allows managers to continuously improve the quality of all kinds of processes (production, administrative, and service) within a firm. Moreover, it is a customer-driven system, in which both internal and external customers of the firm define and demand their requirements that are then implemented into the system. The new required tools for CPI to effectively operate include statistical analysis, process analysis techniques (such as IBMs Department Activity Analysis), and group problem-solving techniques (such as cause and effect diagrams, or more recently, Fukudas CEDAC approach) (p. 34). However, one of the most powerful and widely used tools in implementing CPI is statistical process control. What is Statistical Process Control (SPC)? The first step in SPC is to define the process from the point of the view of the financial manager. Then, the characteristics of the process are observed and measured over time. The numbers obtained from these observations are used to monitor the pr
