Ask ten consultants and you’ll likely get ten different terms for efficiency programs. There’s lean manufacturing, continuous improvement, Six Sigma, Toyota Production System, Theory of Constraints, Batch One, one-piece flow, mass customization, assembly line production, and the list goes on.

What they all have in common at the core is just one thing. We can’t be satisfied with the status quo.

“But it’s the way we’ve always done it,” somebody will say. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it right or wrong. Times do change. Company needs and customers change. Machinery, technology, and workforce skills change. Customer tastes change. Materials and finishes change. With all of that change, if you aren’t adapting to keep pace, you are losing ground.

However, you can’t just grab for whatever shiny new thing is floating by. What any improvement program requires first is analysis. It makes it lots easier to change the status quo if you have empirical evidence that the existing system has problems, and even better, some data that might clue you into a source. Then you must analyze the data to look for improvements, test your solutions, keep analyzing, and keep improving.

Too often people see all these efficiency initiatives as goals in themselves. “If I can just develop a Batch One production system, we’ll be in great shape!” Not so fast.

One of the most common methods of improving efficiency is to look for bottlenecks and attack them. Of course, once you do that, you’ll quickly discover you never actually eliminate a bottleneck. You just move it somewhere else in your plant. Making one process more efficient will reveal the inefficiencies somewhere else.

That’s why the improvement must be continuous. You need to be ever vigilant for potential gains. And you have be reconciled to the fact that your reward for making any improvement is going to be dealing with another challenge somewhere else. You find that your finishing department is the biggest bottleneck in your operation, and you focus all your energies there, eventually achieving huge gains in efficiency. Suddenly, now the CNC router seems to be holding everything up. Or maybe it’s assembly or a rough mill operation, or the front office and engineering.

One of my favorite books on production improvement is Eli Goldratt’s “The Goal.” If you read it, you’ll realize that it’s a very ironic title. A goal sounds like a destination, some physical place you can reach. But there’s no such thing in modern production. We’re dealing constantly with a moving target. And, if we are ever lucky or skilled enough to hit that target, there are plenty more ready to pop up to take its place.

Whenever and wherever you embrace continuous improvement, be sure to focus as much on the continuous as you do on the improvement.