Management fad or sustainable competitive advantage?

To survive in today’s business environment organisations must continually improve their operations to overcome the many challenges in the marketplace, such as increasing global competition, decreasing time to market for new products, price/margin pressures and rising shareholder expectations. In order to successfully tackle these challenges and gain competitive advantage, organisations embark on business improvement efforts to enhance their productivity; improve the quality of products/services; and reduce waste and costs.

Continuous Improvement (CI) – and its many variants – plays a key role in efforts to improve performance. In Michael Porter’s view, in the face of today’s fierce competition CI is critical for organisations wishing to reach operational excellence. It is not easy to attain the full benefits that CI methodologies can deliver. For this to happen requires organisations not only to master relevant skills but also demands leadership, collaboration, long-term commitment, and above all a willingness to undertake their own journey. The benefits will then hugely offset the investment of energy and time – GE and Toyota have been confirming this for many years.

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This article is part of Axon's Change Management Process.  To view other articles in this process please visit the Change Management page.