Improve Your Business Process with A3 Report
Or most processes, actually
If you lead a team which has goals to improve processes, you need to trust your team and deal with the fact that things won’t always be done EXACTLY the way they are in your head. Because we are all different, and, even if there are lots of rules in process improvement, there is also a big grey area where personal judgment are into play so to solve this problem, Lean management has offered a tool which can minimize such challenges. Also, you do not require any certification and deep statistics knowledge.
In this post, I am covering this tool
“A3 Report”.
I love this tool as this focusses on condensing the key information in just one-page.
Yes, you heard it right. Just one page report. It pushes you to keep key pertinent information along with charts and graphs, actionable insights in just one-page.
History:-This tool is part of Toyota Production System.”A3" refers to the metric paper size ( 11 inches *17 Inches)
How to use this tool:-
Step 1:- Capture the description of the problem (should be breif)
Step 2:- What current situation looks like, (Must be visual, use charts and graphs to showcase key challenges)
Step 3:- Now we know the problem, time to share analysis and root cause (combination of charts and key issues in a bulleted format)
Step 4:- Document goals, what exceeds expectations looks like
Step 5:- Recommendation on how to implement the key actions (briefly capture cost and benefits)
Step 6:- Detailed implementation plan. You can include Gantt charts and action plan template covering start/end dates, owners and status of completion
Step 7:- Follow ups and controls- How you will sustain the results
Overall this report is similar to PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) Cycle and focusses on the problem and its solution.
If you would like to read more about A3 Report in details, refer to follow links-
Hope this helps!
