Editor's Note: Milliken will host a plant tour during IW Best Plants Conference. They also be conducting a Workshop: How to Build a Stable Foundation to Fully Optimize Lean Principles.

Operational excellence is vital to a manufacturer's financial health -- and not only because of cost and quality improvements. Operational excellence creates the space for innovation and creativity to blossom. By tackling operations improvements with a systematic regimen of identifying and solving organizational problems, day-to-day incremental innovation emerges and resources are freed up to pursue breakthrough innovations. In the 1990s, Milliken & Co., a multinational group of textile and chemical companies, envisioned operational excellence, institutionalized within the organization, as the delivery system for improved performance and innovative products and services.

Since the 1980s, Milliken leaders have questioned the conventional wisdom that climbing is the hardest part of any journey, deciding instead that climbing is the most valuable experience of the journey. As a result, Milliken prepared to climb, step by step, and launched 125 separate corporate initiatives focused on people, process and business excellence. The company measured anything that could make it stronger -- safety, customer satisfaction, on-time delivery, quality and product development.

"Reviewing leading or lagging indicators was always done with one part patience and two parts determination," says Vice President Craig Long. "We had the tolerance to explore how to improve and the excitement to do it."

Milliken customized the Toyota Production System to its own culture and operations (the Milliken Performance System) and applied the scientific method to new initiatives, examining and experimenting with ways to improve even the smallest aspects of its business. Where new techniques worked, they were shared; where results lagged, experiments began again -- plan, do, check, adjust (PDCA). Soon, the company saw aggregate positive trends, the first steps on a journey that would result in a host of innovations and improvements.

Milliken, a thriving organization with more than 100 years of manufacturing expertise, now operates with the energy, urgency and clarity of purpose found in start-up companies. Company leaders believe Milliken's blend of disciplined design, purposeful creativity, innovative spirit and experience allows it to win in the face of four brutal truths that often derail organization improvements, preventing innovation and sustainable excellence.

Brutal Truth No. 1:
The majority of performance-improvement programs fail.

Successful improvement requires a strong organizational commitment and culture around learning. There is tremendous value in organizations adopting the healthy self-image of a perennial student -- inoculating them against what David Garvin of the Harvard Business School calls the "not-invented-here syndrome."

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