One Good Idea
2001
Solve Administrative Problems With Quality Tools
A Pareto analysis helps pinpoint why employee expense reports are rejected
These reports must abide by strict government guidelines, so our accounting department developed a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet used to assemble the expense report information. In order to ensure this missing material was included when a report was submitt...
Column: One Good Idea: The Deck of Cards
A variation of Deming's funnel experiment
A seminar where we attempted W. Edwards Deming's funnel experiment as described in his book Out of the Crisis was disastrous: The instructions were difficult to follow, marbles were rolling across the tile floor, and the activity took forever. A...
Column: One Good Idea: Change the way people think
The use of quotes can influence the way employees view new quality initiatives
In my new job, I started over with Quote 1, but I changed the comment so it related to my new role. Again, I started over with Quote 1 and a new set of comments. --Thomas J. Peters in Quality Quotes by Hélio Gomes (Milwaukee: ASQ Quality Press, 1996)....
Column: One Good Idea: Measuring training's effectiveness.
Pre- and post-test scores help organizations monitor training initiatives....
It's Attitude That Counts
Focusing on a positive outlook can improve a company's performance
But when we let people implement their own ideas, even seemingly silly ideas, the ideas worked. These ideas may sometimes seem unworkable, but when folks implement their own ideas, taking responsibility for the results, they make the ideas work--even if t...
Column: One Good Idea: It's attitude that counts.
Focusing on a positive outlook can improve a company's performance
Techniques come and go. They all work, but they're only tools. To really make improvements you have to work on attitude. The basic tools will always work regardless of the program or current guru at hand. The simple statistical techniques always work,...
The Scripted Flowchart Process
Creating concise and effective procedures
Creating a scripted flowchart The flowchart has long been successfully used to illustrate systems. The benefits of scripted flowcharts Unlike the traditional flowchart, the scripted flowchart is not separated from the descriptive text. With scripted flowc...
Column: One Good Idea: Use Run Charts To Confirm Root Causes
The assumed cause of variation can be checked with run charts....
Use Run Charts To Confirm Root Causes
A case study about reducing waste and saving costs
Validating the root cause Wondering if there was a way to confirm Vickie's theory that inexperienced operators were the root cause of the scrap, George asked the quality department for the scrap reports for the past several months. He overlaid the employm...
Evaluating Just-In-Time Projects From a More Focused Framework
If our goal is making more money, then productivity improvement would be a logical criterion regarding project selection. Goldratt's managerial accounting system, throughput accounting,4 provides the JIT project selection framework needed for internal con...
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