Best Practices in Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement: A Deeper Look

Chapter 1. Magnitude Advances in Competitive Standards and Technologies

In the healing trades, blood-letting is out. Leeching has gone much the same way. But putting leeches on wounds has been found to draw extra supplies of blood to the wound, thereby healing it faster. Leeching works, though the practice has limited application.

In getting work done, batch-and-queue management is going the way of bloodletting. Lean in all things is taking over. As for process quality, the inspection-based mode, once the norm, is like leeching: by no means the preferred way, but there if needed. Modern practices in lean and quality are, like those in medicine, a mixed bag. Some treatments have broad curing powers, others are weak or limited, still others are dubious, and a few that have fallen into neglect deserve resurrection. A central aim in Best Practices is to critically sort out these treatments. This initial chapter provides a bit of historical perspective.

HOW ARE WE DOING?

Are management practices any better today than 30, 60, 90, 120 years ago? The answer is much better, as applied to both people and processes.

First, let's look at people. In about 1975, in an earlier life as a university professor (after a still earlier one as a practicing industrial engineer), I frequently took students on plant tours. One was to a Goodyear plant that made rubber drive belts and hoses. At about 1:30 in the afternoon we walked down a corridor past the plant's cafeteria. Tables were filled with production ...