Operational excellence: Enabling sustained growth Spotlight on the Americas

The Americas should be a hotbed operational excellence activity. The scientists and businessmen who first applied statistics to process improvement—Deming, Taylor and others—hailed from the United States. In the 1980s, Royal Bank of Canada pioneered the use of customer relationship management (CRM) software, while Procter & Gamble rolled out an early business intelligence (BI) system. In the 1990s, Dell, Southwest, Amazon and Wal-Mart achieved dramatic growth by making their operations world-class. Companies in the Americas should lead the world in growing through operational excellence.