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  Industrial Excellence
  Lean Manufacturing
  Six Sigma
  Business Process Management
  Kanban

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After the preliminary work has been done (essentially in the production), it is then possible to move on to global improvement and a cybernetic control of the company’s system, in order to maintain the loop towards Industrial Excellence. The next step is the running and constant improvement of the process.

Process approach: a company should be tackled like a system (dynamic interaction of the elements as a whole, structured in relation with an objective) and its organisation should be rethought in terms of a process (interactive or correlated activities which transform input elements into output elements), a system being broken down into a subsystem, and finally a process into a sub-process; It is wise therefore to go from a macro-system and a Company macro-process to reach the operational systems and processes (Sales, Design, Purchasing, Production, Monitoring, Logistics).

Six Sigma: the Six Sigma approach formalises the cybernetic loop of the process control, standardises the scale of performance and enables their control by regulating their variability.
Six Sigma can be divided into five stages: definition, measurement, analysis, improvement, monitoring, but can be distinguished especially by its quantification of objects and measurements. Indeed, the performance of a process will be expressed by the proportion of products (process results) complying with demands, with the aim being to maintain a number representing six times the standard deviation (ie, 99,9997%) of distribution. The Six Sigma approach can be applied to any granularity of processes (from the macro-process to the individual machine). Nevertheless, it is best to avoid the trap of “local optimums” and to constantly size the demands (objectives) of a sub-process in relation with their contribution to the performance of the process (description of objectives and calculation of performance).

It is clear that Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma, which may seem sequential at the beginning, are under no circumstances limited and will have to co-evolve intelligently, preferably with a global and concerted vision.