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

Epilogue

Everyone wants to be slim and trim, but few achieve that aim. Or they achieve it but are unable to maintain it. And so it is with lean in industry. In either case, it is because there are too many diversions and too little perseverance. That may explain why so many companies are losing ground in the lean quest. The research shows that, both in the long run and over the past few years, most companies, industries, and regions are getting worse on the main leanness metric, inventory. Lead times are lengthening, and companies are losing connectivity with customers and suppliers.

Most of the inventory and the lead-time growth, and the many problems they cover up, are in the pipelines. One reason seems obvious: elevated global risks. Friedman's The World Is Flat, though, gets you thinking. If there is validity to the Theory of Conflict Prevention, the world is less scary than we thought. That means risk is less of a reason for all that inventory in global pipelines.

That brings us to the second obvious reason for long, bulging pipelines: Ever-more goods move to and from distant, developing countries. The truism that all that off-shoring is raising global inventories is amply supported by the leanness data. Yet one industry, electronics, bucks the trend. The strategy of sending production to whoever can do it best spawned the huge electronics manufacturing services sector. In so doing, it made the electronics industry by far the most geographically dispersed. For all that dispersal, ...