Q 599. What does Best of the Best (BoB) mean in terms of process excellence? How does the knowledge of BoB processes help in continuous improvement?

 

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In General, When Something is mentioned as Best of the Best means “that it is of the Highest Quality, excellent or Highly desirable type.”
In Process excellence the BOB can be explained in such a way that,
In a Controlled Process, if the value of specific dimension plotted continuously in a control chart the plotted distribution goes up and down from the nominal. While this degree of variation will naturally occur in a process which is called common-cause or Natural variation.  But still Process owners can make use of this opportunity to study why the reading is not very near to Nominal always. 
From this we can understood that the Values which is very near to the Nominal are BOB (Best of the Best) and values which are extreme from the Nominal are WOW (Worst of the Worst)
Example:
In Bi-lateral tolerance, if we take a nominal value this is called Best of the Best value (BOB).
Consider the specified value 85.50+/-0.3 
Here the USL (Upper Specification Limit) is 85.80
And LSL (Lower Specification Limit) is 85.20
And the Nominal value is 85.50. 
Hence BoB (Best of the Best) value is 85.50 
In Unilateral tolerance,
Consider the Value 20.00+0.000/-0.004      
Here the USL (Upper Specification Limit) is 20.000
Here the Nominal value is the Highest limit of the dimension i.e., 20.000 
Hence the BoB value is 20,000

 

All the Process owners desire to achieve BOB in their process and WOW (worst of the Worst) being the opportunity to evaluate the process. The process must be studied thoroughly why the BOB and WOW occurs.

In Continuous Improvement, if we capture these values in exact process conditions it gives us thorough understanding of the process. also, it provides insights on variable and constant parameters to be maintained, in order to achieve the best BOB value in the process.

Based on this data, we can understand which parameters can be tuned to achieve the BOB value. Tools like DOE can be used to screen and optimize these variable parameters.

Note: Other factors like Process cost, Pricing and End user product criticality, etc., also needs to be considered while optimizing the BOB value.

BOB and Process Excellence

 

In the field of Process Excellence (PEX), we get the two concepts of Best of Bests (BOB) and Worst of Worsts (WOW).

In any organization, the Process Excellence leads to Operational Excellence and in turn it leads to Business Excellence.

 

 

 

Assuming the x-axis (in the below image) as the average value of the data, the process goes up and down the average giving the concepts of BOB and WOW.  The closest values to the x-axis is considered to be Best of Bests and the extreme values of the specifications are considered to be Worst of Worsts.

 

 

All the process analysts would like to achieve BOBs and we can consider the WOWs as opportunity to learn and evaluate the process itself to achieve the organizational goals.

 

The keys to Process Excellence (PEX) are given below:

1.  Need to know what we are doing;

2.  Change what we are doing;

3.  Lead the team;

4.  Getting team for execution;

5.  Good knowledge of all technological tolls;

6.  Ready to fail;

All the above pointers lead us to setting up processes, monitoring the processes, do the performance analysis, automating the processes, optimizing the processes, achieving the organizational goals, etc.  These are the essential founding steps of Continuous Improvement (Kaizen).

 

 

 

These continuous improvement efforts lead to Business Process Excellence.  While analyzing all these data, we get BOBs and WOWs in each and every above pointers, and need to improve the BOB points and decrease the WOW points.

 

Hence the knowledge of BOBs would be of great help in achieving the Process Excellence.

 

Best of the Best (BoB) refers to the best performance of the process which is sometimes also referred to as the Zentitlement of the process. By knowing what the BoB is, a process excellence professional will always have a view on how much better the process can be made.

D. Nandakumar had provided the best answer to the question.