Author name: Forrest Breyfogle

Through Lean Six Sigma many businesses have reported significant performance improvements. Though management may be satisfied with project selection and project execution, there is nagging doubt about whether enterprise as a whole is benefiting. Quite often Lean Six Sigma projects are often not in direct alignment with the achievement of corporate financial goals. Lean Six Sigma is not a business system. Lean Six Sigma is a project execution system. Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) is a business governance system that takes Lean Six Sigma and traditional scorecards to a new level. IEE is a business system where performance improvement metric needs pull for the creation of IEE projects. IEE replaces firefighting with fire prevention and integrates scorecards, strategic planning, business improvement, and control. IEE helps organizations move toward achievement of the 3 Rs of business; i.e., everyone doing the Right things, and doing them Right, at the Right time. IEE provides the framework for achieving maximum, measurable, predictable and sustainable bottom-line results.

Traditional management metrics often include tabular reporting and perhaps classic trend and bar charts. Management can also use a scorecard system to monitor and track both financial and non-financial areas of the business against measurement goals established for each of these metrics. With this scorecard approach, metric owners can be tracked against and are responsible for achieving the goals established for their respectively balanced scorecard metrics; i.e., financial, customer, internal business, and innovation and learning perspectives. Benefits can be achieved from these traditional performance measurement systems; however, if care is not exercised, many of these systems can lead to the wrong business activities and the sub-optimization of processes. However, In Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) system cascading measurements can be created, which aligns metrics to the overall needs of the organization. The tracking of these measurements over time can then pull (using a Lean term) for the creation of IEE projects, which addresses common cause variability improvement needs for the process output.