Focusing on redefining excellence, Richard J. Schonberger challenges traditional financial metrics of sales and profits in assessing a company's value. Drawing from his expertise in the Just-In-Time revolution, he presents new benchmark data that illustrates how industry pioneers evolve into enduring dynasties. This book offers fresh insights into management practices that prioritize long-term success over short-term financial gains.
Best Practices in Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement reveals how to refocus lean/six sigma processes on what author Richard Schonberger—world-renowned process improvement pioneer—calls "the Golden Goals": better quality, quicker response, greater flexibility, and higher value. This manual shows you how it can be done, employing success stories of over 100 companies including Apple, Illinois Tool Works, Dell, Inc., and Wal-Mart, all of which have established themselves as the new, global "Kings of Lean," surpassing even Toyota in long-term improvement.
No company is built to last, argues world-renowned manufacturing guru Richard J. Schonberger. After sixteen years of prosperity, he shows, nearly 75 percent of the world's most admired manufacturing companies have slipped badly from their peaks in 1995. In this devastating indictment of current manufacturing practices, Schonberger submits a four-part revolutionary plan to solve the manufacturing crisis for good. From his statistically reliable database of 500 top global manufacturers, Schonberger finds that by the critical worldwide standard of lean production -- shedding inventories -- General Motors, General Electric, Toyota, and other world leaders have stopped improving. He presents powerful evidence that in recent years record profits have covered up waste and weakness. Clearly a lack of will to renew and recover from the natural tendency toward regression and erosion, it is more than a matter of garden-variety complacency -- devastating as that is in this new era of global hypercompetition. Schonberger asserts that the inclination of industry leaders to engage in stock hyping to gain a quick fix from the dot-com explosion has distracted attention from "the basics" of world-class excellence. Among other villains contributing to the crisis, Schonberger contends, are newly hired managers with no trial-by-fire experience; bad equipment, systems, and job design; and retention of unprofitable customers and anachronistic command-and-control managerial hierarchies. What to do? Just as he introduced the legendary "just-in-time" framework to the West in the 1980s, Schonberger prescribes strong medicine to cure our current malaise. Find your blind spots, he says. Roll confusing, time-sapping initiatives into a master program that is immune from "the flavor of the month." Put lean into heavy-handed control systems. Develop products and standardize processes at "home base" for ease of migrating volume production anywhere in the world. Timely and essential, "Let's Fix It!" will be warmly welcomed by the legions of Schonberger readers and every manufacturing manager who believes passionately in continuous improvement.
