What starts as one well-chosen LEan improvement can ignite a chain reaction that reshapes a company’s culture, lifts its margins, and lands its name on the Shingo Prize roll of honour.

That is the journey we begin in Module 4 – Quick Improvement Planning & Execution. You have already drawn a Future-State VSM for a single product or service and plotted 30-60-90-day targets in Module 3; now we will show how the very first project on that list can snowball into enterprise-wide excellence and profit growth.

Take Autoliv’s Ogden air-bag plant. Its lean journey began in the mid-1990s with one production cell experiment; today the site runs 135 cells, ships 700 000 airbags a week, and is on track to grow annual sales from $1 billion to $1.5 billion while seven sister plants have earned Shingo recognition.

Boston Scientific’s Coyol facility followed a similar arc: a small 2004 pilot blossomed into the world’s largest biopsy-device plant, winning the Shingo Prize in 2019 after moving from Bronze to Silver in four years and achieving carbon-neutral status along the way Shingo Institute.

Even century-old heavy industry is not immune. Vale’s Clydach nickel refinery—founded in 1902—used a handful of quick-win projects to tackle quality bottlenecks; the site became the UK’s first Shingo laureate and credits the programme with long-term gains in safety, productivity and customer trust bus-ex.com.

Herman Miller’s furniture “Greenhouse” moved from a single Toyota-mentored cell to an enterprise system that slashed floorspace, freed cash, and kept the firm profitable through a 28 % industry downturn Lean Enterprise Institute.

Beverage-can maker Rexam saw one Brazilian plant earn the prize in 2012; a decade later one-tenth of its global network is Shingo-accredited, using the same pick-the-next-project discipline you will practise today APQC.

The financial upside is not anecdotal. Long-term research on SMEs shows EBITDA margins climbing from 11% after three years of lean deployment to more than 50 % after seven years planet-lean.com.

Culture-focused winners such as O.C. Tanner (Shingo Prize 1999) and Merit Medical Tijuana (Prize 2018) report sustained growth and are now benchmark sites for visitors from around the world INTERACTIVE SMART TEXTBOOKSMerit Medical.

The Shingo Institute itself calls the award “the world’s highest standard for organisational excellence,” a marker that an operation has converted quick-hit projects into principle-driven habits Shingo Institute.

Over the next three hours you will learn—and immediately rehearse—the same sequence these companies used:

1. Prioritise ruthlessly: convert your opportunity list into a Value-vs-Effort matrix and lock accountability with a one-page RACI.
2. Execute in sprints: run tightly scoped 5-day kaizen events linked to the 30-day bucket of your roadmap.
3. Make it stick: embed three-tier huddles and visual controls so yesterday’s gains become tomorrow’s baseline.

By the end of the module you will have chosen and chartered your own “first Shingo project,” ready to start Monday morning—and, if history is any guide, ready to accelerate both operational excellence and profit.