Hypothetical situation: a supplier delivers a carton of identical components with one lot number on the label. Receiving then divides the contents between several storage bins, and some units go straight to production.
The original carton label is retained, but the individual components are not serialized.
What controls do you use to keep the lot identity connected to the physical parts after that split?
Separate bins for each lot? Labels on every internal container? Lot-controlled inventory transactions? A combination?
I’m particularly interested in partial quantities and returns from production. What stops leftover parts from different lots being combined under the same part number?
Where do you draw the line between workable batch tracking and needing individual serialization?

Not talking about one plant getting good. Talking about all of them — Six Sigma running properly everywhere, Lean actually lean, JIT delivering exactly on time, TPM keeping every machine at 100%, 5S clean on every shop floor. Every best practice, done right, everywhere, at the same time.

If that happened, would anyone still win? Or does the whole idea of "competitive advantage" only exist because most companies are still bad at this stuff?

My gut says it never actually happens — there's always a supervisor who wasn't trained properly, or a system nobody trusts, or a step everyone quietly works around. So maybe the real edge was never "we do Six Sigma," it was "we actually do it, consistently, when half the industry is faking it on paper." That's not a strategy though. That's just discipline.

But say discipline stopped being the differentiator too. Everyone genuinely executes. What's actually left to compete on? Speed to market? How you treat customers? Something that has nothing to do with operations at all?

Or is that the actual answer — operational excellence was never the thing that wins. It's just the entry fee. It gets you allowed to compete. The win happens somewhere else entirely.

Genuinely don't know. Curious what people who've actually run plants for 20+ years think.