OVERVIEW

On a hot afternoon during the summer of 1996, Senior Vice-President of Operations James "Tank" Williams initiated a meeting to discuss how Aircraft Braking Systems Corporation (ABSC) was going to break through the current continuous improvement logjam. ABSC had historically been a high-performing company and now found itself at the point where its rework- and scrap-related costs were not getting any lower. The company was flatlined at $2 million for two consecutive years. Granted, the cost of these "bad goods" in relation to sales was not all that bad in comparison to benchmarks for manufacturers in the industry. In fact, it was 0.8% in 1996. This was world-class performance according to the metrics published in the November 2001 issue of Industry Week magazine. Regardless of how ABSC compared to other benchmark statistics, it was extremely annoying to be flatlined on its bad goods metric. Besides, $2 million is $2 million, a significant amount of money in anybody's book. The $64 million question was how to take it to the next level and break through the $2 million barrier. The obvious answer available at the time was to establish a directive that mandated the adoption of one of the predominant continuous improvement methodologies: Lean, Six Sigma, or Theory of Constraints. To do so would have established ABSC's identity as a "Lean" company or a "Six Sigma" company, and the challenge from then on would have been to educate everyone in the company as to what their new identity...