Enabling process improvements through systems thinking

Manufacturing organizations around the world strive to improve processes with varying degrees of realization. There is no right way or latest and greatest process that can guarantee success, therefore the approach, and not necessarily the process, is critical. Since every process improvement project is different, using the systems thinking approach decreases the risk of failure as the implementer(s) is/are more aware of critical items on the fringe which might otherwise be neglected. Process metrics are vital for many reasons including motivating employees, determining the level of need for process improvement, and evaluating the outcome of a process improvement project. When evaluating whether a project should be pursued, the expected results on the subsystem and other subsystems should be estimated and tied to the highest level metric, which ultimately should equate to bottom line impact. This evaluation technique ensures a positive impact on the entire system, rather than producing only a subsystem optimum. A subsystem metric indicates a project's success through the use of a hypothesis test. This usage requires that the subsystem metric, which will be used to measure a process improvement, must be stable before initiating the project.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Dolak, Jessica

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Daniel Whitney and Roy Welsch.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Engineering Systems Division.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37128

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37128