When the Wall Street Journal reported that 70% of improvement projects fail to hold gains, we could have assumed that quality gurus had it all wrong. But the problem is not with Deming or Lean or Six-Sigma or Toyota methods. The root cause of short lived improvements is unstable processes where individuals did not understand the “what” and “how” of their process. Without this knowledge, functional overlap, duplication of efforts, competing priorities, errors and dissatisfaction for the customer rule. The goal of this webinar is to help organizations operate in a standardized, optimized and aligned harmony and realize lasting improvements in quality and cost.

The presenters advocate making processes visible, understanding requirements, and striving to standardize, optimize, and align every process. To start by organizing processes using a Functional Tree Structure (FTS), documenting and then stabilizing important processes and educating workers before using traditional Lean or other improvement programs. These simple steps have shown enormous returns. FTS uncovers process variations, lack of adherence to standard processes, conflicting perceptions of customers’ needs, unacceptable variation in inputs and outputs, and processes that don’t have the capability to provide services that customers want. This is grouped together and called instability.

Success is impossible when processes and inconsistent, unaligned, and sub-optimized. Stability occurs when all involved parties understand what is expected and how their process works. This webinar reviews FTS and documents examples currently in practice. It will direct where your organization should go in order to achieve stability and lasting improvements.