Continuous Improvement Continuous improvement is not a tool or technique as such; more a way of life or at least a cultural approach to quality improvement and the concept of continuous improvement has to be set in the context of the quality "movement". Quality as a business issue in the way we know it now arose with labour specialisation, mass production and automation techniques; techniques which moved away from the traditional expert craftsman approach to quality. In the new world of factories and mass production, quality was obtained by inspecting each part and passing only those that met specifications. This was true until 1931 when Walter A. Shewhart, a statistician at the Hawthorne plant at Western Electric published his book Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product (Van Nostrand, 1931). This book is the foundation of modern statistical process control (SPC) and provides the basis for the philosophy of total quality management or continuous process im