Four decades ago, process improvement was in the doldrums. A global bright spot was Japan, which contributed an impressive menu of original, borrowed, and adapted concepts and practices to quality thinking. One set of practices, grouped under the quality umbrella, has gone by evolving labels, including statistical process control (SPC), total quality control (TQC), companywide quality control, total quality management and Six Sigma. A second improvement regime, focusing on process flow, migrated westward in the early 1980s as just-in-time (JIT) production and was later renamed lean manufacturing. Its scope expanded and it became known as lean management. Early on, JIT was commonly linked as JIT/TQC and then much later as lean Six Sigma.
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