This book presents a model of organization transformation success. The model framework comprises a series of S-Curves (maturity curves) of planning and execution activities phased over time. The model is illustrated through description and analysis of an actual, two-decade, highly successful, global enterprise transformation Six Sigma program at a Fortune 200 company: Cummins, Inc. Lessons learned from the model and company case study are completely transferrable to other organizational culture, improvement and innovation transformation settings. This insightful book: * Documents a firsthand account of a successful transformation. The authors completely explain what was accomplished and the lessons learned from a 16-year deployment of Six Sigma at Cummins. * Acts as a benchmark for those organizations interested in pursuing primarily a continuous improvement transformation, and more generally for other types of transformation efforts. * Includes substantive interviews with ten key leaders and others who made the transformation possible. * Helps organizations shorten the overall transformation timelines. The documentation of a transformation provides you a model for how to think about organization transformation maturity over time and plan for it. * Recognizes the work of thousands of people involved in transforming a global company. The interviews provide extraordinary perspectives not only by executives who initiated and sustained the transformation program but also by program participants who themselves grew as managers and leaders in their careers through the program. Essentially, this book helps early-career managers and executives see the broader picture of enterprise transformation, especially over time. This helps them be better managers and executives, and importantly, helps them better plan for and hasten their upward career trajectories. Lastly, the book describes a view of possibilities. It describes a clear, sustained success, the steps taken to get there and the measurement of progress. The result provides you with confidence that successful transformation is possible and worth the effort.

The fast and easy way to understand and implement Six Sigma

The world's largest and most profitable companies--including the likes of GE, Bank of America, Honeywell, DuPont, Samsung, Starwood Hotels, Bechtel, and Motorola--have used Six Sigma to achieve breathtaking improvements in business performance, in everything from products to processes to complex systems and even in work environments. Over the past decade, over $100 billion in bottom-line performance has been achieved through corporate Six Sigma programs. Yet, despite its astounding effectiveness, few outside of the community of Six Sigma practitioners know what Six Sigma is all about.

With this book, Six Sigma is revealed to everyone. You might be in a company that's already implemented Six Sigma, or your organization may be considering it. You may be a student who wants to learn how it works, or you might be a seasoned business professional who needs to get up to speed. In any case, this updated edition of "Six Sigma For Dummies" is the most straightforward, non-intimidating guide on the market. New and updated material, including real-world examplesWhat Six Sigma is all about and how it worksThe benefits of Six Sigma in organizations and businessesThe powerful "DMAIC" problem-solving roadmapYellow, Green and Black--how the Six Sigma "belt" system worksHow to select and utilize the right tools and technologiesSpeaking the language of Six Sigma; knowing the roles and responsibilities; and mastering the statistics skills and analytical methods

"Six Sigma For Dummies" will become everyone's No. 1 resource for discovering and mastering the world's most famous and powerful improvement tool. Stephen Covey is spot-on when he says, "Six Sigma For Dummies is a book to be read by everyone."

Grafton Whyte introduces and explores a new academic theory for customer service delivery for Africa, aimed at addressing issues of poor customer service and poor service delivery. The V-Model of Service Quality (VMSQ) offers a powerful tool for measuring service quality, augmented by a service exchange model to provide a general framework for services, describe core components and provide contexts within which the VMSQ can operate. The VMSQ provides an indication of where problems may lie in a service operation, and an additional African Management Matrix identifies some of the historical and contextual barriers that need to be overcome by African managers to achieve effective customer service delivery. This book grounds the theoretical interventions in data drawn from case studies in the Sub-Saharan African context to make the models applicable to both researchers and working managers. It looks at the complex question of customer service delivery in Africa, and embraces both concepts of customer service and service delivery.

Improve the delivery of library services by implementing total quality management (TQM), a system of continuous improvement employing participative management and centered on the needs of customers. Although TQM was originally designed for and successfully applied in business and manufacturing settings, this groundbreaking volume introduces strategies for translating TQM principles from the profit-based manufacturing sector to the library setting. Integrating Total Quality Management in a Library Setting shows librarians how to improve library services by implementing strategies such as employee involvement and training, problem-solving teams, statistical methods, long-term goals and thinking, and an overall recognition that the system (not the staff) is responsible for most inefficiencies.Total Quality Management in a Library Setting describes the principles of TQM, its origins, and the potential benefits and barriers to be expected when adopting quality management approaches in libraries. Chapters provide guidelines for planning and implementation to help libraries use total quality management to break down interdepartmental barriers and work on continuously improving library services. The contributors, who have begun to think about using or who are already using TQM in a library setting, present specific planning and implementation issues that can be put to immediate use in libraries. With this innovative book, library managers will learn that by working together on problem solving teams to address specific operational questions, and by developing a shared knowledge of problem-solving tools and techniques, staff members grow personally and gain a larger sense of organizational purpose. Other TQM methods introduced in this book include the concept of the internal customer, which teaches staff to recognize how other staff members use the results of their work, and the principle of continuous improvement, which enables libraries to set measurable goals based on quantitative performance indicators, and to monitor progress toward those goals.

The book is unique within the competition as readers will gain an understanding of how to build effectiveness, rather than just efficiency, into their thinking and into the culture of their organisations. The book applies to an international audience in the public sector and also across sectors. Written by two leading authorities and practitioners of public management performance measurement.

This book fully details, as the title suggests, the real secret to maximizing an organization's profitability. While many companies have implemented improvement initiatives such as Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing, there is a missing link which, when discovered and implemented, will take these same companies to profit levels not seen before. This missing link is the Theory of Constraints, and when it's combined with Lean and Six Sigma, true transformational improvements are sure to follow. In this book, the author walks you through the step-by-step method on how to combine these three methodologies with the result being significant improvements to flow, major improvements in variation, substantial reductions in waste, superior on-time delivery, and ultimately, maximized profitability. He has been using this integrated methodology for many years and each time, the results realized were well beyond what the leadership teams had experienced previously. The genesis behind this combined improvement cycle is based upon many years of analysis of both failures and successes using Lean, Six Sigma, and the Theory of Constraints as stand-alone improvement initiatives. By integrating Lean, Six Sigma and the Theory of Constraints into a single improvement cycle, the author has developed a recipe that will maximize your return on investment, cash flow, and net profit. The Secret to Maximizing Profitability is both stimulating and thought provoking, but more importantly it will provide your organization with a roadmap for maximizing the use of your resources to achieve more bottom-line improvement than you ever imagined possible.

The Audit Value Factor: Making Management's Head Turn empowers readers with a systematic method to build and maintain a value-centric internal audit organization. The book explores how to identify, quantify, and articulate value for customers. It details six critical success factors: Value propositions that link directly to customer needs Fostering customer relationships using the CREATE model Talent development using the TEAM model Risk expertise that raises awareness, understanding, and action Change management and process optimization using the SMART model Data analytics that provide powerful insights to operations The Audit Value Factor offers easy to use tools and practical strategies that deliver tangible and immediate benefits for the internal audit team. Praise for The Audit Value Factor: Making Management's Head Turn "Daniel Samson, the inspiring and forward-thinking CAE at SRI International, has created an essential guide to adding value through Internal Audit in his new book The Audit Value Factor. It's an important addition to any internal auditor's toolkit, with helpful suggestions on topics ranging from talent planning to data analytics. I highly recommend it to any internal audit professional looking to "up their game." Laurie A. Hanover, CIA, CAE Sunrun Inc. "Internal Auditors often strive for a 'seat at the table,' be it with Business Leaders, Senior Management, the Board, or really, any significant decision maker in an organization. In The Audit Value Factor, Dan Samson provides the roadmap to ensuring that Internal Audit gets not only that seat at the table, but also that role of a critical business partner that is valued in facilitating change and helping an organization achieve its goals." Brian Tremblay, CAE Acacia Communications "Great audit functions generate value and build leadership capacity from staff to CAE. The Audit Value Factor's compelling examples, data, and actionable tools enable auditors at every level to build relationships of trust, ask the right questions, and deliver powerful insights to their organization." Dr. Kathryn Bingham, Executive Coach and CEO, LEADistics LLC

If your company is adopting world class manufacturing techniques, you'll need new methods of performance measurement to control production variables. In practical terms, this book describes the new methods of performance measurement and how they are used in a changing environment. For manufacturing managers, as well as cost accountants, it provides the theoretical foundation for these innovative methods and is supported by extensive practical examples.

Winner of the Walter E. Masing Book Prize 2019 at the International Academy for Quality. Perceptions as to the nature of the Quality Sciences and disciplines vary across the world depending on local industrial history. This can cause problems for global organisations who often want to retain the quality policies of the parent company whilst attempting to embrace the approaches familiar to local people. For example, whilst Western organisations have embraced Six Sigma, Lean and other Japanese management techniques, we have tended to adopt them in a hotchpotch fashion, bolting them on without ever understanding the context behind total quality control. In Japan, these concepts are not considered to be standalone but are all part of a seamless companywide matrix of interactive concepts, which can be summed up as company-wide quality work, of, by and for all. In essence, this means that 'quality' is everybody's responsibility from the chief executive downwards. David Hutchins has over several decades worked in all of the cultural blocks and has consistently managed to integrate all of these differences into a single companywide approach. When the concepts covered are integrated into a total company-wide programme, the intention is to make that organisation the best in its business; in Japanese terms this implies 'Dantotsu', which means 'number one thinking'. Accessible and practical in approach, Quality Beyond Borders is split into short sections, each representing a self-contained idea for the reader to digest and reflect on. It is a valuable resource for business practitioners, students and academics alike that will enable you to reach beyond your own borders to implement new ideas with significant results.

The next step in the evolution of the organizational quality field, Lean Six Sigma (LSS) has come of age. However, many challenges to using LSS in lieu of, in conjunction with, or integrated with other quality initiatives remain. An update on the current focus of quality management, Quality Management for Organizations Using Lean Six Sigma Techniques covers the concepts and principles of Lean Six Sigma and its origins in quality, total quality management (TQM), and statistical process control (SPC), and then explores how it can be integrated into manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare operations. The book presents the background on quality and Lean Six Sigma (LSS) techniques and tools, previous history of LSS in manufacturing, and current applications of LSS in operations such as logistics and healthcare. It provides a decision model for choosing whether to use LSS or other quality initiatives, which projects should be selected and prioritized, and what to do with non-LSS projects. The author also details an integration model for integrating and developing integrated LSS and other quality initiatives, and common mathematical techniques that you can use for performing LSS statistical calculations. He describes methods to attain the different Six Sigma certifications, and closes with discussion of future directions of Lean Six Sigma and quality. Case studies illustrate the integration of LSS principles into other quality initiatives, highlighting best practices as well as successful and failed integrations. This guide gives you a balanced description of the good, bad, and ugly in integrating LSS into modern operations, giving you the understanding necessary to immediately apply the concepts to your quality processes.

Although world-class firms like GE and Motorola have relied on Six Sigma to build their performance cultures, these processes are all too often left out of human resources (HR) functions. This lack of Six Sigma principles is even more surprising because preventing errors and improving productivity are so critical to the people management processes of hiring, retention, appraisal, and development. From the history and evolution of the Total Quality movement to initiatives for introducing a Six Sigma continuous process improvement strategy in your HR department, Achieving HR Excellence through Six Sigma introduces a new way to envision your role within the organization. It explains how this powerful methodology works and supplies a roadmap to help you find and eliminate waste in your HR processes. Describing exactly what HR excellence means, the book outlines dozens of proven approaches as well as a hierarchy of the exact steps required to achieve it. It illustrates the Six Sigma methodology from the creation of a project to its successful completion. At each stage, it describes the specific tools currently available and provides examples of organizations that have used Six Sigma within HR to improve their organizations. The text presents proven approaches that can help you solve and even eliminate people management problems altogether. Filled with real-world examples, it demonstrates how to implement six sigma into the transformational side of your organization. It also includes a listing of additional resources to help you along your Six Sigma journey. Explaining how to build a new business model for your HR organization, the book supplies the new perspective and broad view you will need to discover and recommend game-changing alternatives to traditional HR approaches in your organization.

Quality Management in Reverse Logistics intends to develop, collect, examine and evaluate a number of quality management (QM) tools and techniques, which can be applied in practice in order to understand, review and improve any closed-loop supply chain process. In other words, the book aims to examine the existing relationship between various well-developed and thoroughly studied quality issues, such as QM, quality assurance, standardization of processes and statistical quality control and the emerging research area of reverse logistics. Quality Management in Reverse Logistics contains modeling and quantitative methods that could be used by practitioners and academics in the reverse logistics industry, as well as a thorough description of QM tools and techniques. The book leads the potential reader to broaden their scope of thinking and acting in the new, promising area of reverse logistics, where QM can be applied.

Based on customer responses to corporate change in the quality era, Perspectives in Total Quality offers readers contemporary analysis of how firms should act. The collection consists of 14 original chapters written by leading academics and practitioners in the field. They discuss topics such as global competition, ISO 9000, leadership development, customer focus, process management, and culture change. A well--documented, scholarly approach will benefit readers who are seeking to improve their understanding of how customer response is shaping corporations. It will also help readers develop their own insights on how global competition through quality and re--organization can help them compete successfully in the next century.

The essence of any root cause analysis in our modern quality thinking is to go beyond the actual problem. This means not only do we have to fix the problem at hand but we also have to identify why the failure occurred and what was the opportunity to apply the appropriate knowledge to avoid the problem in the future. Essential Statistical Concepts for the Quality Professional offers a new non-technical statistical approach to quality for effective improvement and productivity by focusing on very specific and fundamental methodologies and tools for the future. Written by an expert with more than 30 years of experience in management, quality training, and consulting, the book examines the fundamentals of statistical understanding, and by doing so demonstrates the importance of using statistics in the decision making process. The author points out pitfalls to keep in mind when undertaking an experiment for improvement and explains how to use statistics in improvement endeavors. He discusses data interpretation, common tests and confidence intervals, and how to plan experiments for improvement. The book expands the notion of experimentation by dealing with mathematical models such as regression to optimize the improvement and understand the relationship between several factors. It emphasizes the need for sampling and introduces specific techniques to make sure accuracy and precision of the data is appropriate and applicable for the study at hand. The author's approach is somewhat new and unique; however, he details tools and methodologies that can be used to evaluate the system for prevention. These tools and methodologies focus on structured, repeatable processes that can be instrumental in finding real, fixable causes of the human errors and equipment failures that lead to quality issues.

This book leads the reader through the process of defining, documenting, and diagnosing workplace problems, in order to act pro-actively before problems arise, as well as coping in the case of unavoidable undesirable situations.

The emphasis is on process rather than exhaustive case studies, while providing a useful practical dimension in a section on interviewing and reporting, balancing out more abstract processes like factor charting. Each topic ends with a self-diagnostic "Pitfalls" section, which readers have found very useful to test their progress, and a collection of forms, tables, and checklists are also provided for further analysis.

Written in an accessible, easy-to-read style, it comes recommended by previous readers who followed the book's methodology.

In this book, we invited 146 authors with expertise in health policy, systems design, management, research, or practice, from each of the countries included, to consider health reforms or systems improvements in their country or region. The resulting case studies, of 52 individual countries and five regional groupings, cover 152 countries or territories, or three-quarters of the world's nations. Each chapter author was asked to think 5-15 years into the future and make a prediction on how their health system could be strengthened as a result of the successful unfolding of their case study. The types of projects our authors have chosen to explicate into the future are wide-ranging. They vary from e-consultation services in Estonia, achieving universal health coverage in Argentina and Mexico, reforming long-term care in the Netherlands, reassessing care for the aging population and the frail elderly in Australia, streamlining the health system through Lean Thinking in Nigeria, using regulation to improve care in South Africa, developing a new accreditation model in Turkey, through to a critique of physician specialization in Russia and applying IT initiatives to improve care in China, Lebanon, Taiwan, Papua New Guinea, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and Wales. Chapter writers recognized that the improvement work they were doing was part of a moving target. There was general agreement that the effective use of limited resources and overcoming hurdles and constraints were crucial to enhancing health systems in order to deliver better care over the medium term. While some initiatives required considerable funding, many were relatively inexpensive. These case studies demonstrate ways in which fruitful application of partnerships and creativity can make considerable gains in strengthening healthcare delivery systems. Features The third book in a series on international health reform Involves 146 contributing authors, five regional editors, a series editor and a highly skilled support team to explore sustainable improvement in health systems in the future Encompasses a time horizon of the next 5-15 years Covers 152 countries or territories, with 52 individual countries and an analysis of five regional groupings comprising 100 countries

Strength-based Lean Six Sigma is a new way of approaching process improvement that combines the best practices of two established methodologies to generate a new approach in order to help you develop and deliver increased high performance in any organization. It is the first book to use approaches in business improvement as well as organizational change for optimum organizational performance and improved agility. Combining the energy and motivation released through a strengths-based approach with the focus on quality and efficiency generated by lean six sigma, it offers practitioners from all disciplines the opportunity to understand each other and work successfully together to drive effective and powerful change programmes.

The fashion industry is a multibillion-dollar global industry with a variety of organizational structures and a multitude of challenges. Such scope triggered the recent rise in management programs in the U.S. and Europe aiming to produce and train young managers to meet such global and diverse challenges. Managing Fashion covers the fashion business with a twist - a management twist. Its goal is to tackle the topics from a fashion manager perspective referencing relevant management concepts and theories, thus offering a deeper and more practical dimension to the issues addressed. It offers a balanced mix of fashion and management, theory and application, as well as creating an opportunity for analysis and critical thinking. Discussions throughout the book are supported by specially developed case studies and relevant examples taken from the fashion industry. It is an opportunity to expose the fashion student or reader, as well as aspiring fashion managers, to a more practical approach to fashion theories and issues. Managing Fashion will serve as a core text for Fashion Studies, Fashion Entrepreneurship, and Fashion Merchandising majors as well as for special business degrees and management certificates targeting the fashion industry.

Offering a planned approach for determining cause and effect, DOE Simplified: Practical Tools for Effective Experimentation, Third Edition integrates the authors' decades of combined experience in providing training, consulting, and computational tools to industrial experimenters. Supplying readers with the statistical means to analyze how numerous variables interact, it is ideal for those seeking breakthroughs in product quality and process efficiency via systematic experimentation. Following in the footsteps of its bestselling predecessors, this edition incorporates a lively approach to learning the fundamentals of the design of experiments (DOE). It lightens up the inherently dry complexities with interesting sidebars and amusing anecdotes. The book explains simple methods for collecting and displaying data and presents comparative experiments for testing hypotheses. Discussing how to block the sources of variation from your analysis, it looks at two-level factorial designs and covers analysis of variance. It also details a four-step planning process for designing and executing experiments that takes statistical power into consideration. This edition includes a major revision of the software that accompanies the book (via download) and sets the stage for introducing experiment designs where the randomization of one or more hard-to-change factors can be restricted. Along these lines, it includes a new chapter on split plots and adds coverage of a number of recent developments in the design and analysis of experiments. Readers have access to case studies, problems, practice experiments, a glossary of terms, and a glossary of statistical symbols, as well as a series of dynamic online lectures that cover the first several chapters of the book.

Dr. H. James Harrington and Frank Voehl have gathered together the thoughts and ideas of more than 20 of the most creative innovation thought leaders from business, professional practice, and academia in this compelling book. The thought leaders look at innovation from almost every angle - their statements offer an unparalleled view of innovation and provide a depth of insight that is extraordinary. Harrington and Voehl's reflection on each chapter, and on the sections within the book, provides useful links between themes and reinforces the relationships between many of the ideas. Anyone interested in innovation (practitioner or researcher) will benefit from this global thought collection. The contributors' multiple perspectives, models, practical examples, and stories provide a sense of innovation that no single writer could ever capture. A company's future growth will only come through successful innovation. This book is organized around Dr. Harrington's innovation pyramid, which consists of the 16 building blocks required to bring about significant improvements in an organization's ability to deliver creative products. It highlights the principles and recommendations in ISO's new innovation standard 56002 and provides many new concepts that are not included in the standard. It includes a free, powerful, and valuable online customized innovation maturity analysis. Following three unassailable facts will strike you as soon as you read this book: 1. Innovation is the new mantra; whether you're involved in a not-for-profit, for-profit, service sector, or governmental organization. 2. Understanding that innovation and creative activities penetrate into every part of an organization requiring multiple perspectives that drive a new way of thinking and working that impacts the organization's culture, social operations, and commercial context that impacts the total organization, and not just new products or services. 3. Innovation is an exciting adventure. Total Innovative Management Excellence (TIME): The Future of Innovation (978-0-367-43242-3, 340635) draws on insights from around the globe in order to be competitive in fast-moving technologies.

In today's hyper-competitive, global marketplace, a manufacturing company needs a competitive edge if it is to survive and grow. That edge could be anything from superior manufacturing technology to innovative product design; from patent protection to solid, well-established customer relationships. One competitive edge available to all manufacturers, but realized by only a few, is the ability to accurately measure, control, and optimize costs throughout a product's entire life cycle. The lack of a methodology to engineer cost optimization into every product makes attaining and maintaining profitability all that the more difficult. Cost Engineering provides a means for a manufacturer to achieve and sustain profitability by designing and manufacturing products to specific cost requirements. It incorporates a variety of proven methodologies including cost estimating, cost control, and cost optimization. Features: Describes the components and organization of an effective cost optimization process Provides detailed explanations of cost estimating techniques for many of the most common manufacturing processes Explains the selection and use of appropriate cost allocation methods Presents the fundamentals of cost-based negotiation Includes both proper and improper executions of cost engineering principles The details presented in this book are important to design engineers, manufacturing engineers, buyers, accountants, cost estimators, cost optimization specialists, and their managers and provides CEOs, COOs, general managers, product line managers, and plant managers with guidance on improving and sustaining profitability. .

Achieve any cost goals in half the time and achieve stable production with quality designed in right-the-first-time. Design for Manufacturability: How to Use Concurrent Engineering to Rapidly Develop Low-Cost, High-Quality Products for Lean Production is still the definitive work on DFM. This second edition extends the proven methodology to the most advanced product development process with the addition of the following new, unique, and original topics, which have never been addressed previously. These topics show you how to: Cut cost from 1/2 to 1/10 in 9 categories-with ways to remove that much cost from product charges and pricing Commercialize innovation-starting with Manufacturable Research and learning from the new section on scalability, you will learn how to design products and processing equipment to quickly scale up to any needed demand or desired growth. Design product families that can be built "on-demand" in platform cells that also "mass customize" products to-order Make Lean production easier to implement with much more effective results while making build-to-order practical with spontaneous supply chains and eliminating forecasted inventory by including an updated chapter on "Designing Products for Lean Production" The author's 30 years of experience teaching companies DFM based on pre-class surveys and plant tours is the foundation of this most advanced design process. It includes incorporating dozens of proven DFM guidelines through up-front concurrent-engineering teamwork that cuts the time to stable production in half and curtails change orders for ramps, rework, redesign, substituting cheaper parts, change orders to fix the changes, unstable design specs, part obsolescence, and late discovery of manufacturability issues at periodic design reviews. This second edition is for the whole product development community, including: Engineers who want to learn the most advanced DFM techniques Managers who want to lead the most advanced product development Project team leaders who want to immediately apply all the principles taught in this book in their own micro-climate Improvement leaders and champions who want to implement the above and ensure that the company can design products and versatile processing equipment for low-volume/high-mix product varieties Designing half to a tenth of cost categories can avoid substituting cheap parts, which degrades quality, and encourages standardization and spontaneous supply chains, which will encourage Lean initiatives. Using cellular manufacturing to shift production between lines for mixed production of platforms and build-to-order to offer the fastest order fulfillment can beat any competitors' delivery time.

ReducedEffort (R) Changeover: The Lean Way to Quickly Reduce Changeover Downtime provides a step-by-step guide for conducting a Kaizen event that empowers the people who do the work to improve how that work is done. Packed with tips, tools, and examples, this practical guide begins with a clear description of the Lean principles underlying the ReducedEffort Changeover system. In addition, it explains how and why reducing the effort always reduces the time of converting a machine, line, or process from one product to another. In this book, you'll find everything you need to quickly and dramatically reduce the effort and time of any process using the ReducedEffort method. This is not another book about how to do SMED. Like SMED, ReducedEffort Changeover (REC) does reduce changeover time, but REC is not SMED. SMED, Single Minute (or digit) Exchange of Dies, developed by Dr. Shigeo Shingo, has been the process used for many years by countless manufacturing plants to reduce changeover time. The SMED process was used in Toyota to reduce the changeover of a 1,000-ton stamping press from four hours to three minutes. As a Lean-based process, the REC system focuses on reducing the labor, not the time, involved in changing over a machine to work on a different product. With REC, there are no Standard Operation Combination Sheets to fill out and no Problem Identification Sheets to complete, and it does not require the arduous chore of timing every task, as SMED does. Very little capital investment is required with REC. Unlike SMED, it does not require management-approved funding to achieve substantial results. Because REC is not capital-driven, management does not need to drive the process. The operators will drive the process because it reduces their labor. One of the biggest advantages of REC over SMED is that operators will readily accept the process, and more important, they will want to sustain it. The reason for this is quite simple and will become evident when the REC process is defined. REC takes SMED to a new level that is easier and faster both to implement and to deliver sustainable results.

The key to success and reaching peak performance is integrating three processes to optimize business through the use of human performance improvement tools, lean thinking, operational excellence, along with a strong organizational culture as the underpinning. These components form the basis of the Peak Performance Model. The tools presented in this book, along with the case studies, demonstrate how the model is applied and integrated into company practices. Companies and organizations want to improve their performance, but many have not integrated the right tools and processes. Through the application of the Peak Performance Model, every company can achieve and sustain Peak Performance.

With 30 years of driving Lean transformations under his belt-both in-house at Danaher and as the founder of Lean Horizons-Mark C. DeLuzio has a vantage point across a variety of industries. He often hears the challenges Lean leaders face now that they've been implementing Lean for a decade or more. They are concerned that they aren't getting the results they used to, and they don't know why. Most leaders believe their problems are unique to their company, but Mark sees more commonalities than differences. Flatlined: Why Lean Transformations Fail and What to Do About It draws on the author's experience as the original pioneer of the most successful Lean business system next to Toyota, as well as his progress over the past 18 years in helping companies replicate what Danaher achieved. Mark DeLuzio knows you need an actionable approach to make rapid shifts, not theory. With this book, Mark DeLuzio gives you: * the reasons why companies are now flatlining with Lean; * five steps to solving this problem, no matter what your industry or corporate culture; * real talk on why your organization is probably mediocre (even if it's making a lot of money) and how to disrupt it to make it genuinely world class; * the questions you should always be asking at every stage and level of your Lean initiative.