Continuous Improvement

Operational Excellence is…

Operational Excellence is a state of readiness that is attained as the efforts throughout the organization reach a state of alignment for achieving its strategies; and where the corporate culture is committed to the continuous and deliberate improvement of company performance AND the circumstances of those who work there – to pursue ‘Operational Excellence by Design‘, and not by coincidence.

Joseph F Paris Jr; Founder


  • Keeping transformations on target

    McKinsey & Company reports on an analysis of high-stakes transformations which reveals a few pragmatic lessons that increase the odds of meeting the organization’s objectives. As a fact, keeping hundreds or thousands of initiatives on track is a monumental task, one that too few organizations around the world do well. And given the statistics that…

  • Know what? So what…

    There was a recent post in the Operational Excellence Group that I own on LinkedIn.  The post was about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Lean Six Sigma program and the benefits that were realized.  The person who created the post was rather excited that the program had saved NASA $1.3 million. Reading this…

  • Whatever happened to Six Sigma?

    GE adopted Six Sigma from Motorola in 1995, and under Jack Welch it became corporate religion. But as GE began a long, slow decline, so did the popularity of Six Sigma. Once synonymous with management excellence, GE’s reputation in the business world plummeted in concert with its share price. As GE’s fortunes diminished, so has…

  • The Manual Pareto Chart

    When was the last time you created a Pareto chart manually?  For those of you not familiar with a “Pareto ” chart, it is simply a bar chart that organizes the categories from highest-to-lowest in frequency of occurrence.  Pareto charts are useful when “issues” outnumber the resources available to solve them; obviously, you would want to put the resources on…