ARTICLES (MAGAZINE)

Lean has a very good tool set; however, it is not a business management system. Practitioners may work with process improvement tools in organizational silos that often have little, if any, positive impact on the big picture. The Integrated Enterprise Excellence system addresses this need for overall orchestration of business operations with process improvement efforts. This article discusses how lean tools are integrated within the IEE system.

People need to maintain control of their behaviors otherwise they might harm someone or their self. For example, people need to refrain from hitting someone when they get very upset with them. Similarly, companies need to have a control mechanism so that healthy policies and procedures are followed. If organizations don’t do this, problems can occur. We have seen the negative impacts on a global scale when companies do not have enterprise-wide control mechanisms that lead and drive healthy behaviors. This article discusses how to avoid some of this similar failures and how to create an effective business control system.

The Enterprise process DMAIC roadmap provides a 21st century governance system that truly aligns scorecards, strategic planning, improvement plans, and control so that the enterprise as a whole benefits. E-DMAIC goes beyond Lean Six Sigma and the Balanced Scorecard. This view of the way a company functions can change from a focus on doing whatever it takes to meet the quarterly financial goals (the Enron approach) to improving performance at all levels so the overall output always reflects the maximum potential for an entire enterprise.

The American Management Association (AMA) describes a 21st-century governance system and how a company benefited from its deployment. The 9-step framework of the described Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) business management system provides a guiding-light roadmap for navigating through and beyond these challenging times. IEE provides a long-lasting system for structurally integrating healthy policy creation and deployment with a systematic blending of scorecards, strategic planning, business improvement, and control so that the enterprise as a whole benefits. IEE system goes beyond many traditional and recent management techniques such as the balanced scorecard. Acknowledgment: Posted with permission from the American Management Association as published in the Winter 2008 Edition of their MWorld Magazine.