Development of a digital continuous improvement system for production

The philosophy of the continuous improvement (CI) process aims at improving process stability and performance whilst increasing employees' competencies at the same time. The difference to single improvement projects lies in the way the workforce is included in kaizen activities on an everyday basis. In a target-oriented CI approach the employees are also actively coached and guided by a leader (e.g. group or team leader) to act as a basis of the learning organization. The success and documentation of the improvement steps are therefore highly dependent on the skills of executives. Because of that, CI is currently being carried out in many companies either in a completely unstructured or in a traditional way with paper-based documentation. At that point digitalization concepts can support the effectiveness and efficiency of a CI system. The target of this paper lies in defining the core elements of a successful CI system and rating them against digitalization approaches which have been used in other parts of manufacturing. The compatibility of CI elements and digitalization approaches are rated with the help of the Delphi method. Following that, the concept of a digital CI is presented, which facilitates communication between managers and actual process improvers, documentation and employee learning during the improvement process. It is then compared to a traditional target-oriented CI process to show the major advantages and next steps in the introduction of such a system. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.