The goal is to attain customer satisfaction (internal, as well as external), long-term profitability, employment security and quality of work life. The objectives throughout all of a company's functions are to improve product and service quality, reduce cost, quicken delivery, maintain safety and enhance employee morale. This is accomplished by meeting client's requirements, attaining error free (first and every time), managing by prevention and measuring the cost of quality.

For many, process improvement is not a priority, even though their projects require rework or cost overruns or do not meet customer requirements. Think about it. Can you afford to keep putting off process improvement? Why wait until rework impacts ongoing production, or one project delays work on another? Missed deadlines cause revenue loss and downsizing! Customers go with the competition. The good news is that process improvement helps prevent these pains. Improvement is best done incrementally. It does not have to cause disruption. There are many ways to get buy-in from everyone.

The benefits that a typical organization can receive are:

1. Increase repeat business because of consistent customer satisfaction.
2. Open new markets because of improved insight into customer needs.
3. Lower costs because of a created team environment with the goal of eliminating wasted resources, such as time, money, people and material.

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"The World Class Lean Manufacturing Self Assessment and Adjustment Matrix";
last updated on 2/18/04.