Productivity Improvement is the ability of an organization to maximize returns on assets. Despite record productivity gains over the past few decades, opportunities for boosting productivity further are abundant. Most manufacturers are far from maxing out on the productivity gains that are available from properly implementing continuous improvement programs such as Lean and Six Sigma.
In order to capture such opportunities, manufacturers need to shift their thinking about what constitutes meaningful productivity improvements and change their internal organizations and cultures in order to achieve them. For many companies, opportunities exist including transforming push-oriented supply chains into more agile, demand-driven supply networks. Similarly, most manufacturers have only begun to realize efficiency gains that are available from the integration of manufacturing and supply chain processes and systems that have historically been separate.