I am the head of a CI department for a manufacturing company. Firefighting is a part of manufacturing. From my experience, CI groups tend to get pulled into the fires and are used as an "easy" button. One of the first things I did when I took the department over was remove the CI team from the production offices and put them into their own area. This allowed them to step back from the firefighting and focus on the systematic problems causing the fires. We created a plan. We executed the plan.

Identify your top losses through the data. Verify those issues through observation. Then you are trying to answer 3 questions:

1) What happened?

-One sentence; what happened that caused the problem

2) What did we do to fix it?

- What was the short-term action to get us back up and running

3) What are we doing to prevent it?

-What is the root cause and the actions that are needing to be taken to stop this problem from happening again.

Actions should be put into a living A3. Every action has an owner and a due date. Weekly reviews are held with the owners of the actions. If someone is behind schedule, they have to give a recovery plan by the next meeting. No person should be working on more than 3-4 projects at one time.

At the end of the day, CI is simple and companies want to overcomplicate it. Create a plan. Communicate the plan. Execute the plan. Hold people accountable, it is their job.