Title: Sustainable continuous improvement programs

Authors: Liem Ferryanto

Addresses: Centre of Excellence for Statistics-Aided Engineering, Applied Materials, Santa Clara, California 95054, USA

Abstract: Continuous improvement programs in their various forms have proven their capabilities in creating value for a company, but often fail to have a lasting impact. The reason is its management and engineers gradually lose incentive and fall back into longstanding ways because they fail to consistently meet their objectives, solving ill-posed inverse problems. The unsustainable executions and results are costly and take more unnecessary time for the company to attain high return on investment. This article examines three key tenets of the continuous improvement programs, i.e., deployment, methodology, and common tool. Behavioural economics approach, scientific principles, and causal inferences based on Bayesian statistics are applied to guide us in evaluating the key tenets. The guidance is used to extract the prerequisites of the mindset development of understanding and improving the mechanism of the true causality and reasoning process to uphold continuous improvement intended goals, i.e., perpetually better quality, and capability improvement.

Keywords: Bayesian inferences; behavioural economics; cognitive biases; hypothesis testing and p-value; ill-posed problems; lean; learning mindset; Six Sigma; scientific principles.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSCA.2022.124973

International Journal of Six Sigma and Competitive Advantage, 2022 Vol.14 No.2, pp.171 - 185

Received: 11 Apr 2021
Accepted: 07 Jul 2021
Published online: 19 Aug 2022 *

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