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

Chapter 10. Process Improvement: Stretching Company Capabilities

Earlier chapters have shown that, by the inventory-turnover yardstick, most of the 1,400-odd companies studied have had mediocre-to-poor success with lean manufacturing and related initiatives. Those that have done well, and done so over the longer term (the smaller portion of some 1,200 companies for which we have 15 or more years of data), later tend to plateau or backslide. Accentuating the point are the starkly poor longer-term leanness scores for Japan, and even for Toyota, and the declining or non-improving scores in the past few years for seven other global areas.

Why is this so? On the surface it makes no sense. The basic, proven tools of process improvement number in the dozens. Most are low in cost, are rooted in simplicity, produce relatively quick results, and are common sense (unless your sense has been warped by years of working in a batch-and-queue environment). The aim of this chapter is to explore a few possible explanations, and consider what to do about them. Candidates include meddlesome stock markets, instability in the form of flitting from one management initiative to another, blindly doing what everyone else does, avoiding what's difficult, and measuring the wrong things. Besides those, one more culprit will dominate this discussion: losing interest or motivation for lack of a Big Idea. Weak results may also be partly owing to the sheer number of best practices—more than many companies seem to ...