Operational Excellence

One of our four focus areas is concerned with the employment of performance improvement programs. Lean Management has become one of the most known and widespread paradigms across different industries. However, we also go beyond this paradigm and the manufacturing sector by studying other improvement programs and other industries as well. All our studies in this field are oriented towards Operational Excellence, asking how organizations can achieve - and maintain it.

We particularly look at company-specific production systems, that manufacturing companies design for themselves, partly adopting principles and practices from known manufacturing paradigms (e.g., Lean, TQM, Six Sigma, etc.), partly designing new elements. This way, we try to understand which practices and principles work well, considering various contingencies during our studies. We even go one step back and study how management can best implement these production systems and look at the effectiveness of different management practices.

Besides our studies in the field of manufacturing, we do also research for service organizations for example. Service industries, such as healthcare, IT, finance, education and the public sector are as well affected by global competition, market saturation, and cost pressure as manufacturing industries are. They therefore also seek efficiency improvements and similarly to manufacturing firms implement improvement programs. With our research, we aim at understanding the critical success factors of such programs.