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

Part II. Improvement Gone Wrong—and Made Right

O.C. Tanner in Salt Lake City, 1999 recipient of a Shingo Prize,^[55] does not have something called the Tanner Production System. The word production would not be helpful in drawing in people from functions such as sales, accounts receivable, and purchasing. Instead, it is the Tanner Improvement System.

Perhaps Tanner got the idea from Milliken and Co., which in 1985 tossed out its suggestion system in favor of initiating its opportunity-for-improvement (OFI) system. OFI thrives at Milliken today.^[56] Word choices make a difference.

Effective improvement systems are uncommon. In a typical facility with two, three, or four hundred people, ten people are improvement-adding, the rest non-improvement-adding. How to harness people's talents and experience to achieve high rates of process improvement remains, largely, a riddle. Managers and professionals see part of their role as generating improvements. Others—the bulk of employees—do not, mostly because of management-system obstacles and neglect.

Getting back to the point of the two opening paragraphs, word choices make a difference. Each chapter in this second section probes improvement methodologies with familiar names, each one generally admired. They include waste elimination, kaizen, continuous improvement, goals, metrics, dashboards, scorecards, lean accounting, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), zero-defects six sigma, and gemba. In all of these we look for, and find, flaws and ...