Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to align accountability and responsibility of each level of the organization and to establish internal and external customer supplier relationships and performance criteria. Design/methodology/approach – Major processes within each natural work team are...

Unveils the myth that process breakthrough methodologies like business process improvement, process re‐engineering, and process innovation, provide a greater total organizational improvement than continuous improvement methodologies. Also shows how to combine continuous improvement and...

The complexity of today’s business environment has made it ecessary to evaluate all the alternatives before committing resources to an improvement process. Combines total business management, total cost management, total productivity management, total quality management, and total technology...

By almost every measure manufacturing quality has improved tremendously in the past decade; unfortunately, the same is not true for service. Yet, manufacturing processes represent less than 5 per cent of all business processes. Clearly, the opportunity area for the twenty‐first century is in the...

Performance evaluations (appraisals) have been blamed for everything from team destruction to personal demoralization. The problem is not the concept of performance evaluation but the way they have been implemented. This technical report provides a sound path to effect constructive appraisals.

If the proper strategies are used to change the business process, high quality and high performance will return to the U.S. workplace.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of the Directed Evolution methodology, illustrate its usefulness in creating systemic change, and how it can be implemented in face of strong resistance to change. The paper aims to demonstrate how comprehensive product/program...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to define the quality and productivity problems, and improvement opportunities that face the construction industry today. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted interviews and surveys plus they researched pertinent literature to come to...

Points out that we have accepted on faith many of our improvement tools without really understanding their impact on the performance of the organization. Challenges some of the basic principles on which total quality management was founded. Presents data from the International Quality Study...