Mechanisms for building and sustaining operations improvement

It is no longer enough, it would seem, to know how to use operations as a competitive weapon, nor is it enough to 'continuously improve' those operations. The spoils of operations-based competition now go to those firms who can improve their operations fastest, and sustain that improvement over time. This fact is unlikely to go away. As the protective tissue separating the world's markets dissolves, firms everywhere have become more and more exposed to the power of those operations which have gone beyond 'world-class' - those who have learned how to improve more rapidly than the rest of the pack. The key is to develop a long-term improvement path - rather than glean quick-hits from the latest fad. This article by David Upton aims to provide some insight into the methods that can be deployed to build rapid and sustained improvement, by first looking at the recent history of operations improvement methods, then describing a new framework for mapping improvement paths and using it to characterize the strategies deployed by some of the world's fastest improvers. The first section presents a brief, recent history of operations improvement methods. The second section introduces a framework for describing some common starting points for building improvement. The third section describes key characteristics of successful improvement initiatives. The final section looks at ways in which firms sustain their performance growth, and describes three models of continuous improvement.