preview

Essay On Creating A Continuous Improvement Culture

Best Essays

Paradigm Shift:
Creating a Continuous Improvement Culture

David Smothers

Management 510
Dr. Ingram
January 5, 2011
Paradigm Shift:
Creating a Continuous Improvement Culture
Successful Lean Six Sigma (LSS) deployments rely on the ability of a deployment to effectively apply Six Sigma DMAIC methodologies with the ability to concurrently apply Lean tools in order to drive Continuous Improvement into the culture of the business. Designing a Lean Six Sigma deployment to be an integrated model ties together the Six Sigma well structured approach with the Lean approach of matching quantity and quality to satisfy customers. Various companies have begun …show more content…

Volvo, Motorola, Ericsson, and Siemens have come to understand how dispersing authority of decision making out to the field organization drives job satisfaction. (Schon, 2010, 99-118) Job satisfaction drives productivity and process improvement. Process improvement cuts out waste. Cutting out waste improves the bottom line. There is still a clear disconnect with the goals and styles of the operations executive team in many organizations today. LSS deployments are bound to struggle without support from all levels of management. A deployment champion has a duty to make sure that projects align with high level goals in order to gain support from management. (Kelly, 2007, 16-17)
Driving Empowerment
Dedicate and empower the right people on the right projects. (Salah, et al., 2010, 254) Business leaders need to take the holistic approach to improving the business in order to achieve long term gain. (Breyfogle, 2010, 94) The holistic approach as opposed to the driven down approach to LSS implementation assumes that an organization has the right people in the organization that can drive the organization to greatness. The driven down approach is very management heavy and decision are not made at the line level. Rather, decisions are dictated to the line level and

Get Access