Chapter List

Overview

Put yourself in the place of the CEO of a tier-one auto supplier (a former division of United Technologies Automotive ^[1]) whose business was barely earning its cost of capital in a really tough market. First and foremost, you ve got to regain your Ford Q1 quality rating to remain in the game. You have been shipping brake hose fittings that are failing, a customer s critical-to-quality issue, which is creating containment costs for you and your customers. You have been notified that if you don t correct this problem, you will lose your largest customer. Marketing has told you that Ford wants to be able to order any of 168 products with only a two- to three-day lead time to support its own Lean initiative. To achieve such capability, your company will have to dramatically improve your currently abysmal on-time delivery performance. You also have to reduce cost by at least 5% per year to generate a superior return on invested capital (ROIC) and keep up with price reductions demanded by the market.

This firm clearly needed to improve quality and delivery time at a very rapid rate. To meet this challenge, this company chose Lean Six Sigma. How does Lean Six Sigma deliver results so much faster than either Lean or Six Sigma? Here s the...