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

Chapter 2. Global Leanness: An Unstable Phenomenon

In 1994, we began collecting inventory-turnover data in a long-range study of how companies are progressing with the lean/process-improvement agenda. By the turn of the century, the sample size had enlarged enough to tell about the state of manufacturing globally. My 2001 book, Let's Fix It! How the World's Leading Manufacturers Were Seduced by Prosperity and Lost Their Way,^[17] set the tone of problems in leanland. (Herbold echoes that theme in his 2007 work, Seduced by Success.^[18])

The database now is made up of more than 1,400 manufacturers, retailers, and distributors in 36 countries.^[19] In this chapter, we plumb that database in order to shed light on two primary questions: (1) Are these companies, on average, improving? (2) Are they, on average, maintaining an improving trend for a period long enough to include changing conditions? The second question is more significant than the first and requires more penetrating data analysis. Before pressing on with the two questions, a few comments about the inventory metric are in order.

INVENTORY: A TELLING METRIC

Lack of inventory is a convenient, close proxy for lean. Anyone looking around a facility and spotting goodly amounts of materials correctly sees the facility as fat, not lean. When a close check turns up very little inventory, we conclude the opposite.

Inventory is visible, countable, and objectively researchable. It is on the books and readily comparable from company to company ...