Developing and Implementing a Multi Faceted Business Improvement Programme in a Manufacturing Environment

摘要

Increasing globalization and customer demands have led businesses to produce a growing variety of products and services, with superior features according to customer preferences [1]. In order to meet these demands, manufacturing companies are following new and emerging trends in manufacturing improvement, often without establishing stability, thus benefit, of the previously improved systems, with the result that potential benefits are rarely achieved. However there are several notable cases in which companies have grown against probability or expectation due to the methodology of improvement being more continuous and building on the status quo rather than redesigning it at each change of emphasis. This paper describes the background to such an approach, thus defining how the successful companies have differed from a paradigm specific approach to their own benefit. Subsequently, a diagrammatic representation is proposed to visually demonstrate this approach, such that other companies could identify the most appropriate scope and scale of improvement activities for their particular instance, achieving the best available fit to strategic objectives.