Going beyond Six Sigma and lean manufacturing for sustainable change.
Over the years, Milliken & Company's commitment to Continuous Improvement and Safety has garnered much acclaim. It’s been benchmarked by company after company, and featured prominently in Tom Peters's A Passion for Excellence.
Curious about what has made Milliken so successful, one of the world’s largest international manufacturing companies approached them in 2006, requesting that Milliken consult with them to improve their operational execution. That relationship formed the basis of the Milliken Performance Solutions business. Like other business management strategies, such as Six Sigma and lean manufacturing, the Milliken Performance System helps businesses increase productivity, quality and efficiency, but unlike lean, Six Sigma and similar manufacturing processes, the Milliken Performance System is a holistic approach that changes the entire culture of your business from the bottom up, resulting in long-term, sustainable improvement.
At Milliken Performance Solutions, we keep three values top-of-mind, all the time:
We support our clients with highly trained and experienced business practitioners who have learned these processes through years of successfully implementing them within Milliken. Why do we call our associates practitioners, instead of consultants? A practitioner is someone who practices a learned profession, whereas a consultant is someone who offers advice. This distinction is part of what makes us different from systems like lean, Six Sigma and other manufacturing management systems like them. We believe it is integral to establishing solid working relationships and truly understanding client needs, and we only work with clients that want to challenge themselves to continuously improve.
Our process for engaging clients is to accommodate, educate, and demonstrate.
Accommodate: We prefer to host key decision makers and influencers at our headquarters in Spartanburg, SC.
Educate: We spend time reviewing the processes and explaining what an implementation looks like.
Demonstrate: Together with our clients, we travel to one of the several Milliken facilities within a short drive of Spartanburg, where clients learn from observing these processes in action.
Our business is built upon the foundation of commitment to continuous improvement and safety. We’ve studied manufacturing processes from around the world, particularly Japan, where the principals of Six Sigma and lean manufacturing were developed, and used what we’ve learned to create a system that we believe improves upon these methods. What we teach is an extension of the experience we’ve gained through years of implementing the processes we’ve developed within Milliken & Company.
