What is Continuous Improvement?

Continuous Improvement - (CI) involves organizational quality and performance, focuses on improving customer satisfaction through continuous and incremental improvements to processes, by removing unnecessary activities and variations. "Quality is a never ending quest and Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) is a never ending effort to discover and eliminate the main causes of problems. CPI means making things better. It is NOT fighting fires. Its goal is NOT to blame people for problems or failures ... It IS simply a way of looking at how we can do our work better. When we engage in process improvement, we seek to learn what causes things to happen and then use this knowledge to: Reduce variation; Remove activities that have no value to the organization; and Improve customer satisfaction. Process improvement is important as it has often been said that process accounts for 80% of all problems while people account for the remaining 20%. (Source: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/perform/process.html)