Learning Across Lines: The Secret to More Efficient Factories

The quest to reduce waste on production lines is unending, but managers often find that the harder they work at improving their manufacturing processes, the more elusive the benefits become. Local quality improvements rarely translate into productivity gains for the factory as a whole, or plantwide cost reductions peter out as the learning curve levels off. Research on learning curves has suggested that the most effective way to sustain efficiency gains is to boost production volume—produce more units—but that isn’t always feasible or even desirable. What’s more, we’ve found that under certain circumstances, efficiency initiatives can actually erode plantwide productivity. Increasing production would merely amplify this problem.