Trappings Vs. Substance In Industrial Marketing

In the last 30 years, American manufacturers have focused on improving operations and they have done very well in terms of cost reduction, productivity, and internal efficiencies. You can’t read a manufacturing magazine without a plethora of articles on continuous improvement. The programs all have acronyms going back to 1980 such as MRP, MRPII, JIT, TQM, ISO, 6SIGMA, ERP, LEAN and many others. Some of these articles are written with the implicit assumption that that if you can execute these programs completely and do everything right, your company will grow.