ABSTRACT
Pete, Dave, and their consultant Ken had proven to be a potent combination. They worked well together, their individual strengths complemented each other’s, and most importantly, they were all learning. Pete, for one, had never learned so much in his entire career. Despite the performance improvement, they were far from levels of excellence, and they knew it. There were still hundreds of “firefights,” or problems, every day. Processes were just not yet that stable and capable of consistently meeting quality requirements. Nobody in the company was naïve enough to think that they were “out of the woods” yet, but it sure felt better than the tough years. The good news was that these incremental improvements, or “kaizens” as the Japanese called it, had them trending upward.
