Operational Excellence, Continuous Improvement, Business Process Excellence, Lean; whatever you call it, the end goal is to improve the results that businesses get. This post is dedicated to celebrating some of the successes that OpEx leaders or companies have had with their improvement efforts.
CEO Doug McMillon said, at the retailer’s annual shareholders meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas, that Walmart will save at least $30 million this year by swapping out existing stepping stools in its distribution centers with a lighter-weight version.
This initiative by Russ Westcott produced a documented net payoff of more than $1 million over the three-year implementation period. In that time, 72 projects were implemented, with ROIs ranging from 5-to-1 to 400-to-1, and launched a new career.
Through the application of multiple tools and techniques within the Project Management, Lean, and Six Sigma methodologies within its project initiative, this example shows how Philips Lighting achieved consistent delivery reliability, pulled customer lead-times from 1% to 42%, and replicated these improvements across 50% of the Outdoor NA portfolio.
North American Building Materials Manufacturer Generates $15M In Savings Through Continuous Improvement Program.
This team took insights from the past 5 years to inform their decisions for Continuous Improvement.
This business excellence program started with 20 people and within 10 years had 2000 active participants, resulting in an 8x increase in tangible, validated benefits for the company and partners or over $100M annually on 3B in Revenue (3%).
In 4 years, over 5,000* NEE employees obtained Lean Six Sigma (LSS) certifications and their Quality projects have generated over $500M in net present value savings for the company (not counting the Yellow Belt “quick win” improvements that are not tracked). Almost 25% of our Senior Leaders are Lean Six Sigma certified*, including the KPI Fire CEO!
300 plants, 120,000 employees. 100% of 400 of Full Time Continuous Improvement professionals were trained. 16,501 projects initiated, 99.9% of projects were completed.
