engleski

Does continuous improvement really matter for the business: a review

When analysing the literature on continuous improvement (CI) as a concept of continuously moving forward it seems there are still gaps in the literature about the relation between continuous improvement and its link to business performance. Many authors state that continuous improvement brings many benefits to organizations however it seems that the benefits of this concept are more expressed in literature than in practice, since studies show its stagnation in organizations over a certain time after its been implemented. Here an overview of possible barriers will be presented. Few studies aimed to analyse organizations who had more mature continuous improvement programs implemented which brought to higher performance of an organization, which seems to be an opportunity in a fast hanging environment. The aim of the research is to address this gap between the continuous improvement and business performance and show a systematic literature review about the topic. Databases Web of Science and Ebscohost were addressed with terms continuous improvement, kaizen and performance. Concentration was on contemporary studies, published articles from 2007 till the end of 2018 were taken into analysis. Research results show that most of analysed articles found a positive relation between continuous improvement and one or more perspectives of business performance however the most prominent perspective in articles is internal process performance, then innovation and learning perspective, after that customer perspective, and then financial performance perspective. On the basis of an analysis there is still a gap considering analysing CI as a strategical process that must be included in every aspect of an organization, therefore the need to be measured and linked to all four business performance measures: financial perspective, customer, innovation and learning and internal process perspective.

: kaizen ; continuous improvement ; business performance

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