TABLE OF CONTENTS We have covered a lot of ground about the Lean Extended Enterprise and strategic business improvement. This chapter provides additional information and insights about value stream integration and other related topics.
As we have mentioned several times, many organizations have consumed a lot of time flitting from buzzword program to buzzword program. Blindly following a guru's latest buzzword fad reduces the organization's creativity, to a rigid set of commoditized improvement actions. Ultimately it creates a tremendous amount of confusion as the organization moves from fad to fad, and it also destroys leadership credibility when these "flavor-of-the-month" programs fail. When you walk into an organization that is anti-change, leadership usually has a lot to do with it. We have seen many organizations that did total quality management (TQM) in 1994, reengineering in 1995-1997, enterprise resource planning (ERP) in 1999, lean in 2000, and Six Sigma in 2002 and have failed miserably at all of these efforts. What is the appetite for another improvement program for these organizations? The larger challenge is getting organizations like this to change once they have been through the disappointing spin cycle of improvement programs. These organizations must step out of their "paintball and smorgasbord" approaches and learn quickly how to benefit from improvement before they become victims of their competitors' improvements. We came across the following quote in our research which proves that the challenge of consistent improvement is not a new concept:
We trained hard but it seemed that every time...
