Total Productivity Management

Total productivity management (TP management) provides a system for coordinating all the various improvement activities occurring in a company so that they contribute to top management’s goals for the entire company. Starting with a corporate vision and broad goals, these activities are developed into supporting objectives, or targets, throughout the organization. The targets are specifically and quantitatively defined.

Productivity is an area that is of prime focus of industrial engineers. Total productivity management is an enterprise level initiative in which industrial engineers need to take initiative and take up leadership position.

Saito and Yokota authored a chapter on TP management in Maynard's handbook of industrial engineering. I wrote a small review on the chapter on google's knol.

http://knol.google.com/k/narayana-rao-k-v-s-s/review-of-total-productivity-management/2utb2lsm2k7a/2298#

IE - Improvement of Systems

IE definition talks of improvement of systems as a function of industrial engineering