This title provides real direction on organizational improvement initiatives. It includes sections on leadership, business infrastructure and new applications to key strategic areas of the business.

Which is the right approach for effective continuous improvement? While much has been written on merging Lean and Six Sigma initiatives, this is the first book to detail a logical alternative - a no-nonsense strategy for maintaining the best of both initiatives without diluting either. In Using Lean for Faster Six Sigma Results, Mark Nash, Sheila Poling, and Sophronia Ward lay out the differences between Lean and Six Sigma, define the distinct power and focus of each, and detail why and how to use them together in a synchronized and complementary way. While Lean focuses on the elimination of waste, Six Sigma addresses variability and reliability. Organizations that initiate Lean early in their continuous improvement efforts create culture change, immediate results, and streamlined processes, paving the way for faster and more effective Six Sigma results. This practical, easy read shows how to choose the right projects, approach, people, and toolset to achieve bottom-line results faster. Readers will benefit from the authors' years of experience implementing Lean with Six Sigma, through detailed case studies from both manufacturing and service companies. If you are struggling with the dilemma of how to integrate Lean and Six Sigma, or deciding which approach to use, read this practical, down-to-earth book to inspire and guide your strategy.

In Accelerated Product Development: Combining Lean and Six Sigma for Peak Performance, Clifford Fiore provides the blueprint for implementing the key elements for improving the product development process. His innovative and powerful work represents the first book to couple the proven concepts of Lean and Six Sigma with the engineering processes of product development. His results, based on proven strategies and methodologies, enable companies to significantly reduce the time necessary to develop new products, dramatically reduce product cost, and improve product quality.

This book helps readers develop a comprehensive understanding of diagnostics for strategic decision-making, with a focus on a method called rapid due diligence. This method presents a compelling solution to the need for effective diagnostics, drawing on academic rigor, critical thinking, systems dynamics, and advanced practicum to enable sound strategic decision-making. Guiding the reader through the six stages of the process from discovery, through analysis, synthesis, and interpretation, Thompsen engages all typical postgraduate disciplines in producing insights for practical application. Drawing on similarities with applied social science research, the rapid due diligence method is supported with scores of techniques, tools, instructions, guidelines, practical advice, and examples. Detailed cases and abbreviated examples of a variety of real strategic situations are provided from organizations operating in North America, Europe, Asia, India, and Australia. Ideal for graduate students, organizational leaders, and decision makers, this book is designed to invite deeper understanding and practical application of a strategic diagnostic process that discovers insights for achieving positive results.

Lean TRIZ is a new workshop-based process that brings together teams to focus on specific processes, evolutionary product designs, and improvement opportunities. It combines the insight of TRIZ with the simplicity of Value Engineering, EXPRESS, or FAST methodologies. TRIZ is the most advanced problem solving tool available. By combining TRIZ’s simplest concepts with those in the EXPRESS methodology (used by Ford and Ernst & Young), it is feasible to apply this new methodology to new concepts that are not traditionally applicable to the TRIZ methodology. This combination is guaranteed to greatly improve the quality and breakthrough results of a team that works on the problem within two days.

In the new millennium the increasing expectation of customers and products complexity has forced companies to find new solutions and better alternatives to improve the quality of their products. Lean and Six Sigma methodology provides the best solutions to many problems and can be used as an accelerator in industry, business and even health care sectors. Due to its flexible nature, the Lean and Six Sigma methodology was rapidly adopted by many top and even small companies. This book provides the necessary guidance for selecting, performing and evaluating various procedures of Lean and Six Sigma. In the book you will find personal experiences in the field of Lean and Six Sigma projects in business, industry and health sectors.

Innovative Change Management (ICM) represents the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of one of the world’s foremost performance improvement specialists. It includes a clear and thorough explanation of the necessary critical tools for creating a system that results in a much higher percentage of your initiatives progressing to successful projects. Studies conducted by organizations such as Gartner, Ernst & Young, and Harrington Management Systems indicate that on average less than 25% of the innovative projects achieve sustained success. The American Productivity Quality Center's 2018 survey report pointed out that 88% of the organizations felt that process management discipline must be changed and 53.8% felt they must create a continuous improvement culture. Through the effective use of the ICM methodology, you can turn thousands of lost employee hours into millions of dollars in increased profit. This book unveils to the reader for the first time how ICM combines project change management, culture change management, and project management concepts to create an effective and innovative organization. These concepts combined result in homogeneous improvements in performance improvement and cultural change. The book outlines a step-by-step procedure designed to apply ICM to complex programs such as process redesign and supply chain management as well as to simpler ones such as relocation of offices. In addition, it provides field-tested change methodologies to help you systematically include change into your strategic management plan. This book shows you how to: Set the stage for ICM. Develop a new management style that encourages innovation. Develop and implement a project change management methodology to support the project management methodology. Develop a cultural change management program. How to reward and recognize the innovation activities generated by your employees. Make ICM an important part of the strategic plan. Help employees understand the career-enhancing aspects of change How to maximize your organization’s ROC (return on change). Most of the activity related to change management focuses on successfully implementing individual projects. Statistics indicate that this is not enough to keep up with today’s rapid changing innovative competition. As most profitable organizations are working diligently on increasing their innovation capabilities, this focus is requiring a completely new restructured management style and behavioral patterns that are foreign to most of today’s successful managers.

This book presents recent advances in optimization and control methods with applications to industrial engineering and construction management. It consists of 15 chapters authored by recognized experts in a variety of fields including control and operation research, industrial engineering and project management. Topics include numerical methods in unconstrained optimization, robust optimal control problems, set splitting problems, optimum confidence interval analysis, a monitoring networks optimization survey, distributed fault detection, nonferrous industrial optimization approaches, neural networks in traffic flows, economic scheduling of CCHP systems, a project scheduling optimization survey, lean and agile construction project management, practical construction projects in Hong Kong, dynamic project management, production control in PC4P and target contracts optimization. The book offers a valuable reference work for scientists, engineers, researchers and practitioners in industrial engineering and construction management.

Today, organizations have achieved an overall failure rate above 80 percent with Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, and continuous improvement in general. This is certainly not due to a shortage of books, consultants, and other online resources about the methodologies and tools, or the success stories of Toyota and others. However, it is due to a shortage of knowledge and practice about the most critical success factors of improvement: leadership, sustaining infrastructure, behavioral and cultural transformation, and now emerging technology. These factors produce 90 percent of the success with continuous and sustainable improvement; the methodologies and tools represent an irrelevant 10 percent. For decades, most organizations have focused on this quick and easy, irrelevant 10 percent through an endless series of fad, in-vogue improvement programs as they attempt to mimic the best-in-class practices of the most successful organizations. Out of the Present Crisis: Rediscovering Improvement in the New Economy is the contemporary version of Deming’s famous 1982 book, "Out of the Crisis." The author builds a solid case for organizations to aggressively pursue the next generation of systematic and sustainable improvement through a combined strategy of Deming’s back-to-basics, innovation and breakthrough thinking, integration of emerging and enabling technology, and adaptive improvement across diverse environments and industries. The book’s practical, pragmatic style is backed up by many real world examples and personal experiences. If you're looking for another book about Lean or Six Sigma "tools" this is not it. But it is a book about how to achieve lasting success by making improvement the cultural standard of excellence and living code of conduct in organizations. This popular book provides executives with an up-to-date and proven reference guide for rediscovering successful systematic and sustainable improvement in today’s economy. The author demonstrates the importance of viewing improvement as a continuous manageable "process" and covers the most critical success factors of leadership, sustaining infrastructure, behavioral and cultural transformation, and emerging technology in a practical, no-nonsense, "how-to-do" style. The book provides specific guidance for all industries including public and private corporations, hospitals, financial services, airlines, municipalities, and federal, state, and local governments.

Organizations around the world are rating their improvement efforts as not producing the desired long-term results. Dr. Harrington‘s research indicates that this occurs because organizations are using the latest improvement tools and approaches without first defining how they want to change their organization‘s culture, environment, and key perform