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4 Reasons Why LEAN Becomes More Popular Than Six Sigma

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LEAN and Six Sigma are complementary strategies to satisfy customers. On the one side, LEAN eliminates waste from your processes and provides a tool set almost everybody in your company can apply successfully. On the other side, Six Sigma reduces variation in your processes and supports to have products and processes in specification a customer desires. Although there is a lot of synergy between LEAN and Six Sigma, [Read more…] about 4 Reasons Why LEAN Becomes More Popular Than Six Sigma

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Does Six Sigma Really Drain Employees’ Creativity?

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In every company employees have to follow processes. Employees receive trainings for these processes and the performance of the processes is measured.  On top of that a lot of companies have introduced continuous improvement or breakthrough methodologies like TPM, Six Sigma and so on. But, does Six Sigma really drain employees’ creativity? Does Six Sigma really kill innovation? [Read more…] about Does Six Sigma Really Drain Employees’ Creativity?

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Thanking Employees Boosts your Company

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Thanking employees by rewarding and recognition seems to be a common practice, but obviously many companies do not apply it. One reason is that still some companies believe paying compensation (or raise salary) should be enough to motivate their employees.  [Read more…] about Thanking Employees Boosts your Company

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The Annual Performance Review – a Dying Dinosaur?

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Most of all employees know it: the annual review. This is the dreaded performance review together with your boss to walk through your accomplishments and targets for the past year. Generally you will also talk about some areas where you need improvements and the trainings to participate for the coming year. But, does this really make sense to talk about performance gaps or training gaps that had occurred months before under concrete circumstances? [Read more…] about The Annual Performance Review – a Dying Dinosaur?

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How Employee Engagement Influences your Business and Corporate Culture

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Typically employees have job descriptions and they are assigned to fulfill a certain function. Often these employees are integrated in a matrix organization where some process owners are assigned to the key value stream processes and support processes. Perpendicular to that you have the functions like Quality Control, Finance, Industrial Engineering, HR and so on. But, for example, what happens when problems in the processes occur which are extended over the local “horizon” of a single employee? [Read more…] about How Employee Engagement Influences your Business and Corporate Culture

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4 Essential Rules for a Good Metrics System

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When we are talking about data driven business or in general about industrial processes, we are talking about numbers and performance. To measure the performance of processes and keep control on them we need appropriate metrics, perhaps a complete set of metrics, a metrics system. These metrics, if carefully chosen, provide deep insights in your business and will help you to identify trends or to identify deviations from your normal (or planned) performance. But which metric do you have to choose? What are good metrics for your business? [Read more…] about 4 Essential Rules for a Good Metrics System

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Why do continuous improvement initiatives fail to sustain?

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In April 2013 Dr. Andreas Freund started a discussion on LinkedIn with the following provocative topic:

Why do continuous improvement initiatives (not projects!) almost always fail to sustain?

In the following weeks he received almost 400 replies and comments from experts all around the world. Many aspects of possible failures while implementing and sustaining Continuous Improvement initiatives were mentioned and intensively discussed. The complete thread of this worth reading discussion you can find here. [Read more…] about Why do continuous improvement initiatives fail to sustain?

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