Continuous improvement is about shifting the focus from capital equipment to operational culture. After World War II, manufacturing responded to the need to ramp up production by buying equipment as quickly and with as much capacity as possible. Given that manufacturing is a system, mass ad hoc capital purchases created inefficiencies. Toyota was the first company to push back on the capital equipment approach and showed through lean manufacturing that there are better approaches to scaling than just buying capital equipment. This was the first appearance of continuous improvement, but similar non-capital approaches such as Six Sigma found ways to improve productivity, flexibility, and quality through focusing on coordination rather than equipment. Lean management has been credited with taking Toyota from obscurity to the top of the automotive industry in the last half of the 20th century. Competitors such as GM, Ford, and Chrysler were happy to copy specific tools in assuming they could replicate the Toyota success, but they were disappointed with their results. It is imperative for companies to understand their operations before beginning any good continuous improvement regime. There are two modes of failure for continuous improvement initiatives and the first is the mode where operations management staff’s knowledge is weak. The second failure mode in implementing continuous improvement is using the wrong metric in project selection.
In late 2016, the owner of RW Citrus & Juice, a business-to-business fresh juice company in Michigan, asked a management consultant to fill in as the company’s interim general manager. The owner initially brushed aside the management consultant’s early concerns about equipment maintenance, and it soon became apparent that the company lacked a basic structure for operations. In a company lacking operational organization, how could the management consultant make sense of the changes that the company required? How should he separate the “must-haves” in operations management from the “nice-to-haves” and communicate the needed changes to a reluctant owner?
The chief public relations (PR) strategist for SG Media is using the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) as an example in her public relations training session. In 2011, the TTC has been in the news because of a combination of poorly managed fare hike announcements and the perception of lax service quality. Consumers have taken to publishing, on social media sites, images of TTC employees seemingly in violation of service standards. The strategist is thinking about an appropriate PR strategy that the TTC could rely on to rectify its image.