During the past two to three years, The Center for Excellence in Operations has been developing new, nonlinear approaches to improvement within the transactional improvement space. Nonlinear process improvement is not a replacement for lean Six Sigma and other project management tools. Rather it adds to the improvement toolbox by offering new approaches that can reveal opportunities for improvement.

Many attempts have been made to improve new product development by poring over and applying lean manufacturing tools such as value-stream mapping, kaizen, 5S, flow and bottleneck management, and agile thinking. Often these attempts waste valuable time, are met with resistance, fail to address true root causes, and are short-lived. Why? Because these complex creative processes include a lot of unpredictability, engineering judgments vs. hard data, a high degree of informal activities underlying a formal process, and fuzzy, cause and effects in space and time. The philosophy of continuous improvement is very applicable to new-product development, but improving these complex processes requires nonlinear thinking, creativity, and adaptive improvement methodologies.

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