"Critically, GE CEO, Mr Culp, understood that reforming GE required not just changes to its structure but also to its operations.
Six Sigma, a series of techniques championed by Welch that aimed to keep manufacturing defects below 3.4 per million parts, had become a barrier to innovation and was dropped.
Instead Mr Culp introduced GE to “lean management”, which looks for small changes that add up to big improvements over time. This approach, pioneered by Toyota in Japan, involves managers solving problems by visiting the factory floor or their customers, rather than from the comfort of their desks.
Today GE executives pepper their disquisitions with Japanese terms such as kaizen (a process of continuous improvement), gemba (the place where the action happens) and hoshin kanri (aligning employees’ work with the company’s goals). More important, Mr Culp and his underlings routinely spend a week on the factory floor alongside workers. The company credits this system for improvements such as reducing the total distance a steel blade for one of its gas turbines travels during the manufacturing process from three miles (5km) to 165 feet (50 metres), and slashing the time to build a helicopter engine from 75 to 11 hours." [1]
1. Less general, more electric. The Economist; London Vol. 451, Iss. 9391, (Apr 6, 2024): 60, 61.
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