What is in a name?

Does it really matter what we call it?

Lean Manufacturing, Lean Six Sigma, Business Optimisation, Re-engineering, Lean Transformation, Service Systems are all terms which we hear on a regular basis.

Does anybody care what we call it?

As long as it does what it says on the tin, and improves our functional performance, we should not be concerned by whichever handle happens to have been hung on the approach we adopt.

My personal opinion is that in order to dress simple ideas up and to make them appear to be more complex, and hopefully more interesting than they actually are, we can often find ourselves being driven to find even more outlandish and complicated ways of describing what we do.

As a result of this I am often asked "What does this word mean"? "What does this process involve"?

In order to try and unravel some of the mystery surrounding Business Improvement, it is my intention to add to the end of each Blog entry a definition of some of the terminology in regular use, and in order to start us off here are three I have recently been asked to describe or interpret.

Six Sigma : Is a business strategy originally developed by Motorola. It seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimising variability within the in control business processes.

Hoshin Kanri (Policy Deployment) : A strategic decision-making tool for an organisation's executive team that focuses on the critical initiatives, (the vital few), necessary to accomplish the strategic objectives of the organisation. Three to six key objectives are selected. The selected objectives are translated into specific strategies and deployed down to the implementation level in the organisation. Hoshin Kanri unifies and aligns resources and established clearly measurable targets against which progress toward the key objectives reviewed on a regular basis.

Kaikaku : Old school term which is now more commonly known as Kaizen Blitz is about really "going for it" aimed at spectacular and very rapid productivity improvements in a focused area. It is a no holds barred, go for it approach and the exact opposite of "paralysis-by-analysis".

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