Like this article? PLEASE +1 it! Evan Signature
Evan Carmichael Top Header about About Home Profiles articles Tools forums inspirational quotes About facebook Twitter YouTube Blog

quality improvement Tagged Articles



What can we learn from the Toyota crisis?
Since the Toyota recalls of recent months, quality experts are asking what happened and what can we learn from their mistakes.
Source One: The “Thinking” Professional’s Solution (Source One LLC Profile)
A Gartner study released at its 2003 Gartner Symposium/Itxpo 2003 stated half of the year’s outsourcing projects would fail to deliver on bottom-line promises. (Information Week; March 26, 2003)
Lean Operations Systems
Thanks to the pioneering success of Toyota, the concept of a "lean" operating system has been implemented in countless manufacturing companies and even adapted for industries as diverse as insurance and healthcare.
Top 7 Questions to Increase Sales Using The 80/20 Rule
Are you aware of the Pareto Principle? Do you know how you can incorporate this mathematical into your business to increase sales?

Other quality improvement Related Articles

Key Ways to Convey Quality
Let’s say that what differentiates your product or service from the competition’s is quality. It may seem like advertising “quality” would be a breeze, right? Unfortunately, it’s not. Customers hear the word “quality” all the time –often from companies selling low-quality products. In this sense, quality is like trust. If a salesperson resorts to “You can trust me,” it’s often an indicator to beware. Accordingly, if a company is too direct in how it advertises “quality,” customers may ignore the claim or be suspicious of it. So how can you prove that your product or service is the real deal? Following are some often-overlooked ways to convey quality.

SEO Quality Vs SEO Quantity
We all know it; we've always known it and we'll tell our own clients and anyone who'll listen until we're blue in the interface. It's ALL about quality not quantity. Quality outs. Quality ins. It's the quality of your link neighbourhood that matters not the volume of inbound links that carries most weight in Google's take on relevance and, ultimately, your search placement.
Do's & Don'ts of BenchMarking
Benchmarking is usually part of a larger effort, usually a Process Re-engineering or Quality Improvement initiative. Most of the early work in the area of benchmarking was done in manufacturing. Now benchmarking is a management tool that is being applied almost anywhere.
Change Management Can Lead to Rigidity and Resistance to Change
Beware of formal organization improvement or "change management" (an oxymoron) plans. Like strategic plans, organization improvement or change management plans can reduce an organization's effectiveness. They can lead to rigidity, bureaucracy, and resistance to change. This sounds like an argument against planning. It's not. We have found that constant and ongoing personal, team, and organization improvement planning is vital. But too many "change management" and improvement plans are built on the same faulty premise as strategic planning - that there is a right path, which can be determined in advance and then implemented. We often hear managers declare that they have the right strategic or improvement plan, but the reason things aren't going according to plan is because of "execution problems." This is a deadly assumption.
How Total is Your Quality Management?
Many well intentioned "Total Quality Management" improvement efforts aren't working. In their international study of Total Quality Management practices, the Conference Board of Canada found one study which showed that "seven out of ten North American companies fail in their attempt to execute a total quality strategy".
Matching Team Types and Focus
Managers' growing understanding of the power of a team-based organization has created an explosion of teams. We're now seeing a profusion of high-involvement teams, high-performance teams, corrective action teams, service and quality improvement teams, project teams, task forces, steering councils, process management and improvement teams, problem solving teams, cross-functional teams, departmental teams, work teams, regional or branch teams, self-directed and self-managed teams, semi-autonomous teams...to name just a few.

Process Management Pathways and Pitfalls (Part Two)
Make sure all your process improvement activities are clearly and tightly linked to your strategic imperatives. Each effort should also have highly focused and specific improvement goals (that are an aggressive, major stretch) and measurements. Establish feedback and follow-up steps for each process management and improvement team.

Successful Change and Improvement Needs Balanced Improvement Planning
As Yogi Berra would say, "It was déja vu all over again." Five years earlier I had conducted a few introductory service/quality improvement workshops for the senior management group and head office support people of a large distribution company. Performance and feedback surveys were conducted and reviewed during these and follow up workshops. The company clearly had problems with sagging morale and customer service, rising costs from inefficient processes and quality problems, and low innovation levels.
Use Strategic Imperatives to Set Improvement Priorities
It was a story with a plot line that's becoming all too familiar. I was meeting with the vice president of a large service organization and his quality improvement support staff. They were frustrated. After a few years of educating thousands of people in their organization, forming and training teams, mapping, analyzing, and "reengineering" a multitude of processes, and "empowering" everyone to improve quality and customer service, little was happening.
Why Most Change Programs and Improvement Initiatives Fail
Many team and organization change and improvement efforts are lost or badly bewildered. Decades of studies have consistently shown that 50-70 percent are failing. There are as many reasons that improvement endeavors lose their way, as there are people, teams, and organizations trying to improve.
Featured Article

Bottom Footer



Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!
Name:
Email:
Popular Articles

Four Reasons Why Entrepreneurs Should Blog

3 Competencies of Leadership

TOP Level Selling
Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.