Next Generation Enterprises

Successful enterprises will embrace a disciplined systematic approach to the critical result drivers through a lean philosophy and enterprise excellence methodologies focused on people, business practices and technologies, and the integration of these systems to create a structure that supports responsive decision making, flexibility and innovation.

A vision statement for next generation enterprises that embrace a high performance, lean manufacturing philosophy:

A lean, flexible and disciplined organization defined by a set of principles and processes that employs groups of capable and empowered people learning and working together in the production and delivery of products and/or services that consistently exceed customers’ expectations in quality, cost and time.

Lean

Lean does not mean the elimination of jobs, but rather it means the elimination of unnecessary duplication and waste in work processes, engineering
and manufacturing.  Anything that adds complexity, cost and time that doesn’t add value
for the customer should be labeled as waste and reviewed for elimination.

Flexible

Every organization today espouses the need for flexibility, the ability to take advantage of new information, changing markets and new technologies quickly.  This ability needs to translate into changing processes quickly and efficiently in order to produce a
greater variety of products in smaller batches to customized requirements and to launch products faster with consistent quality.  Typically this translates into re-configurable, scalable, cost effective manufacturing processes and facilities to minimize capital investment.

Disciplined

Many organizations see flexibility and disciplined as incongruent, but in actuality, in order to achieve flexibility an organization must become disciplined so that the organization is working or building according to schedule with common methods and procedures that keep processes stable so that the desired results are expected and achieved.

Empowered People Learning and Working Together

Although a cliché, people are the single most important competitive driver in any organization.  It is also the one asset of the organization that we have almost complete control over; who we hire, how we train and motivate, and how we manage the talent pool is readily within our control.  Therefore creating educated, capable motivated workers with substantial independent decision making is vital.

Exceeding Customers Expectations

Customers experience companies through quality, cost and delivery and so it is critical that we are able to not only meet those three dimensions but exceed customers’ requirements by providing products and services that fill more than basic
needs and wants.