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Abstract During the recent years, the major driving forces of customer preference, vehicle safety, environmental protection, and flat demand for new cars led to a proliferation of car models and associated price reduction in the auto supply chain. To react to the complex and competitive environment, auto suppliers are urgent to conduct continual improvement (CI) in an effective and systematic way. Thus, this paper presents a framework for CI. The Integrated Development System is proposed to integrate both capability maturity model integration and six‐sigma approach. By implementing the framework, an automaker can establish a solid process‐based management system, identify critical processes, and optimize these processes. For demonstrating the application of this framework, a case study is presented and the result shows that all expected processes' performance targets are achieved, which has dramatically improved by 70% compared with the past records. Apparently, the proposed framework would act as a useful reference to improve an organization's process maturity. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Lin et al. (Wed,) studied this question.