ABSTRACT
With the market pressures for better quality, reduced cost, and increased productivity, companies are struggling to improve their processes to achieve enhanced levels of productivity and quality. One of the major reasons for this challenge is that companies are not addressing the activity to improve processes in a standardized way. Ad hoc initiatives, and actions that ignore the data and are based on guessing, are very common. Therefore, in many cases, the improvements are not sustainable and after time passes the process returns to chaos again. In order to improve processes, it is very important to address the problem with a process mind-set using a standard set of activities so that improvements will be permanent.
