Operations Improvement Manager

The company has also successfully used the behaviour-based approach to improve meetings. However, the ultimate success came when employees realized that the model used in their safety improvement programme could be directed to their quality improvement initiative. (This venture is described in Chapter 7.) As the Operations Improvement Manager said, Is it the answer to all our ills Of course not, but it worked for us and it could be worth finding out if it could work for you. ... 

Experience shows that adopting the principles of lean manufacturing from assembly industries can be a powerful operational improvement lever. Lean management, first introduced by Toyota, appeals because it holds out a promise no other approach can make not only does it cut costs and improve quality, but it also stabilizes operations and matches supply with demand. A companywide lean transformation program structured around the improvement of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) may unearth a hidden capacity that is equivalent to adding another plant to the manufacturing network. Lean, however, should not only be applied in production, but across the entire value chain. 

Khosro Ezaz-Nikpay is a principal at McKinsey. He is based in London from where he leads the European purchasing and supply management practice. He has carried out extensive work in this field, primarily with consumer goods, automotive, and process industry clients, and has also worked on strategy, postmerger management, and operational improvement. He holds a BS from UC Berkeley and a PhD in chemistry from Harvard University. 

William Li is Associate Professor in the Department of Operations and Management Science at the University of Minnesota. His interests are in experimental design, optimal designs, and quality improvement. 

Consolidated chemical-related safety and health requirements here provide a context for the need for the chemical user to incorporate pollution prevention into every phase of work, sueh as planning, acquisition, operations, waste management/disposal, and continuous improvement. This chapter does not contain requirements for implementation of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reporting requirements or for environmental regulatory compliance. 

Bessant, J. and Francis, D. (1999). Developing strategic continuous improvement capability. International Journal of Operations Production Management, 19(11), 1106—1119. 

SEMP combines a variety of offshore operating programs into a single, integrated, flexible, always-improving management scheme. It specifies how to ... 

Section 23 of the management regulations highlights the significance of continuous improvement as an important instrument for pursuing prudent operations. Improvement efforts are directly related to continued development of knowledge and expertise, and accordingly represent a driver for such work. ... 

Improving their returns on economic capital, the actual capital used by the bank to support its operations, by managing risk effectively... 

There are a number of traps in the root cause category called unintended consequences. These refer to well-intentioned but misguided efforts at cost reduction and other forms of operations improvement. An example is flavor-of-the-month initiatives. For example, when Total Quality Management (TQM) was topical, training programs and TQM teams flourished. Some organizations even used the number of teams in action as the measure of TQM effectiveness. 

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