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FREE GUEST MEMBERSHIP WITH LOADS OF DOWNLOADS

Our Guest Membership is our way of letting you get to know us with no cost and not risk to you.
You'll get permanent use of the forms you download, and access to loads of content while you are a guest member.

Guest Membership Content

Learn About Our Guest Membership Program

We've put together a video to orient you to our guest membership program. The first few minutes give you a tour of the guest membership. Then it transitions into the big picture of how the program fits into CIDS, our phased approach to helping you learn the Lean tools and create an improvement-oriented business management system.

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Our Guest Membership Program gives you a LOAD of free content

Getting started on your Continuous Improvement Journey has never been easier. We give a wealth of value for free in our Guest Membership Program to get you on your way.

You'll get access to guest versions of our forms initially, and premium (full) versions of select forms in our Newsletter and Bonus Tracks (coming soon...)

  • Get a load of free forms and tools. Over 30 guest versions are available. And they are yours to keep with a permanent corporate license.
  • We unlock many videos for our guest members.
  • Great offers and special limited time access to bonus content through our newsletter.
  • Single sign-up to access all our free course content.
  • Access to the guest version of our reference guide, the Continuous Improvement Companion. The CIC currently contains 739+ terms.
Why Do You Need a Guest Membership to Get Free Content?
Our Content is Delivered in Our Course Player

Our course player is a powerful, versatile system to deliver content to you. It can play videos, display online content, show slideshows, and give you access to downloadable content.

And once you sign up for a guest membership, simply go to 'My Dashboard' to see all the material you have access to.

Frequently Asked Questions
There's no catch. We just want you to get to know us better, and our membership and newsletter is a great way to do that. As long as you stay subscribed, you'll enjoy access to loads of free content.

You can quit anytime you want, and there is no cost.
With a guest membership, you get a lot.

  • * 30+ Forms and Tools
  • * 731 Terms in our CI Reference Guide
  • * Loads of Videos
  • * Access to our CI Dev Guide
  • * Bonus materials
Our guest membership downloads come with a permanent corporate license. The means it doesn't expire, even if you cancel your membership. Anything you already downloaded is yours to keep.

The corporate license means you can share it within your company. It is limited to 20,000 people, and to a single reporting unit. For most people, that isn't an issue. A reporting unit is normally identified by having its own president. This is common in holding companies and in multi-nationals that are broken apart by regions.
There is an administrative email to get you started by confirming your address.

We have a series of a few messages about your membership that we'll send out over the next year. You can cancel this series if you want.

Finally, we send out a newsletter when we have something meaningful to say. Our goal is to eventually be rolling out enough new content to justify a weekly newsletter, but lately, it has been going out way less than monthly as we are immersed in upgrading our systems over the last 6-9 months or so.

Phase 1 Content in Our Guest Membership

Phase 1 is the 'Introduction and Exploration' step of our Continuous Improvement Development System, designed to help you "Learn. Teach. Do. Build."

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Guest Membership User's Guide

Our Guest Membership Guide explains how to get the most out of this program.

INFO

Continuous Improvement Companion (Guest Version)

The Continuous Improvement Companion is our extensive reference guide. It is far more than just a glossary, or a dictionary, or even an encyclopedia. It is chock full of videos and takes a deep dive into the meaning of most terms, with things like Leader's Notes, Frontline Notes, Words of Warning, Key Points, and more. With your guest membership, you get the guest version of this resource.

Guide

Ramblings of a Continuous Improvement Coach

This video program is a random collection of thoughts about any continuous improvement topic that comes to mind. You get access to any of the volumes (usually quarterly) that are active while you are a guest members. You do not have access to archives.

VIDEOS

Continuous Improvement Development System Overview

Our CIDS is the backbone of everything we do. It is the framework for creating a CI-Focused Business Management System. It follows a phased approach, with each phase guided by a set of principles. You get access to the overview of the system.

Guide

Newsletter / Online News and Info

Our newsletter comes with our Guest Membership Program. It lets you know about new content and bonus materials. It also provides insight into how to put the content to great use. We also offer online news and info through our Dashboard.

NEWS

Decision Matrix Template

This tool helps you break big, complex, daunting problem into a series of small questions. Based on how you answer those easy questions (i.e. is cost or ease more important, or which item has the fewest historical failures), you get a single number that ranks your choices.

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Phase 2: Committing

In Phase 2, companies commit to a building a continuous improvement culture.
A notable step is that leaders are required to start making changes in how they manage to ensure they are on board with change.

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Policy Deployment Matrix

Our Policy Deployment Matrix is perhaps the most important form we offer. It charts the course for the company for the next 3-5 years.

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Policy Deployment Action Plan

The Policy Deployment Action Plan is a tool to help create confidence that the goals laid out in the PD Matrix are grounded in reality.

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Policy Deployment Bowler

The Policy Deployment Bowler is used to show progress towards meeting PD goals. It is depicted in green (hits), red (misses), and yellow (within 5% of targeted gain).

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KPI Bowler

The KPI Bowler is the junior sibling to the PD Bowler. It does the same thing, but is used for frontline departments and contains operational goals as well as slices of PD goals.

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Phase 3: Starting the Journey

In Phase 3, changes start happening in earnest. There is a massive focus on problem solving in this phase. Most continuous improvement tools are really just pre-packages solutions to common problems. Further, most CI efforts fail. 76% by one study. So, there's a 3 out of 4 chance (lower if you choose us) that you'll end up abandoning your efforts somewhere down the road. With our progression, at least you'll walk away with some problem-solving tools.

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Red Tag

Red Tags are signals that someone is asking whether an item is needed in a work area. It is used to prevent a kaizen team from removing important items.

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Problem Barrier Assessment Sheet

The Problem Barrier Assessment Sheet is a tool used to help tear down resistance to change. It requires people to identify the reasons they think a problem has not been solved. It is useful for identifying trends in the reasons poor processes are tolerated.

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Noise to Constant Sheet

The Noise to Constant Sheet is a tool for deciding on an approach to improving a process. Generally, you want to convert special cause problems to noise (random fluctuation), and then dealing with the noise.

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5 Whys Form

The 5 Whys is an extremely useful tool primarily because it is both easy to teach and easy to learn. It helps guide people to make sure they understand the root cause of a problem.

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Phase 4: Building the Foundation

With a mental shift in your leadership and robust problem-solving skills developed in the earlier phases, you are ready to start laying the foundation for a strong business system and continuous improvement culture.

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Daily Management Worksheet

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Countermeasure Sheet

The Countermeasure Sheet is like an "A3 Lite" tool. It helps guide your through a problem-solving process. Its defining characteristic is the "solution calculus" section where you have to estimate how much of the gap each solution must close.

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Standard Work Sheet

The Standard Work Sheet is an overhead view that show the flow of people and materials through the work cell.

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Standard Work Combination Sheet

The Standard Work Combination Sheet is a timeline that shows how people and machines work together to balance to the takt time.

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Time Observation Sheet

The Time Observation Sheet is a tool that is used to assess the time it takes to complete the steps in your Standard Work.

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Waste Recording Form

The Waste Recording Form is a tool used to collect data on the wasteful steps in an operation. It is particularly useful because it helps people think of all the types of waste, and because it puts it into an easily sharable format.

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Kaizen Checklist

The Kaizen Planning Checklist walks you through the multi-week process of preparing for and conducting a kaizen event.

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Kaizen Charter

The Kaizen Charter Form sets the parameters for a rapid improvement project. It clarifies the problem statement and scopes out the project.

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Interruption Log

The Interruption Log is a tool to track the times a person is disrupted while performing their process. It is most commonly used in the office environment where a person may have a supporting role in addition to other duties. The obvious goal is to create a list that can be used for process improvement.

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Office Process Capacity Form

The Office Process Capacity Form is used to determine the theoretical limits of an administrative operation. It is used for improvement planning (where can bottlenecks be removed), or for understanding how much demand can be absorbed in the current state.

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Office Process Questionnaire

This tool is used to help guide an interview with a person about their process. It helps keep the interview from turning into an interrogation. It also ensures that all the key questions are asked.

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Office Process Recording Sheet

The Office Process Recording Sheet is similar in purpose to the Time Observation Sheet, but for offices. It records the steps of an administrative process, plus supplies a bit of additional insight.

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Office Process Summary Sheet

The Office Process Summary Sheet is a tool used to highlight the before and after data when there is an improvement project in an office area.

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Kaizen Newspaper

The Kaizen Newspaper is a tool that can be used both for tracking progress during a project as well as for managing follow up action items.

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Kaizen Audit Form

The Kaizen Audit Form is the tool used to make sure gains stick. There is a tendency after projects for operators to gravitate back towards the old way. This audit form is used to try to prevent that.

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Phase 6: Keeping Momentum

There is really no end state to our Continuous Improvement Development System. In Phase 6, you will keep pushing for improvement. You will try to improve your understanding of existing tools, strengthen your systems, and try out new tools. The journey never ends.

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A3 Report Template

The A3 Report Template is a powerful communication tool used for significant problem-solving projects. While there is no set format for A3 Reports, this template provides a good starting point.

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SIPOC Analysis Sheet

SIPOC (Supplier-Inputs-Process-Outputs-Customer) is a tool used to look critically at how value flows through your operation.

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FMEA Worksheet

The FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) tool is typically used by engineers to assess new products. An under-utilized application of this tool, however, is in assessing risk associated with improvement activity.

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3P Idea Evaluation Matrix

The 3P Idea Evaluation Matrix is Derived from our Decision Matrix Template. It is pre-filled with some criteria relevant to the 3P Process.

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3P Process Overview Form

This tool provides an at-a-glance view of the steps of the final process settled on during the 3P event. It is used both to communicate the results as well as to confirm all the t's are crossed and the i's are dotted.

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7 Ways Comparison Form

This tool is the output of a brainstorming session and shows a comparison of the top ideas.

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7 Ways Idea Generation Form

This is a brainstorming tool. Participants in the brainstorming session come up with 7 ideas on the topic, preferably in drawing form. The ideas can be cut apart and used in an affinity diagram exercise to group similar ideas, and either a multi-vote or a decision matrix to narrow down the ideas.

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