Quality Circles are a continuous improvement tool that was popularized in the US in the 1980s and 90’s but have since faded from common use. Quality circles are basically project teams that meet on a regular basis to take on quality issues in their work area. They tend to be Read more…
Queue time is a very specific form of waiting, one of the traditional seven wastes. It occurs when a person or item is in line behind something else and is waiting for the same resource. Queue time occurs in two basic flavors. There is the time spent by the customer Read more…
Lines are a fact of life. They result from a company trying to keep the costs of providing its services in check in the face of fluctuations in customer demand. With enough resources to handle spikes, companies never make customers wait. Of course, profit would drop significantly because employees would Read more…
QCD is the acronym for the broad categorization of metrics and KPIs in continuous improvement. The acronym QCD stands for: Quality: In most cases, this view of quality is “conformance to specification”, rather than grade. Cost: Cost, obviously, has a prominent role due to its close tie to profitability. Delivery: Read more…
In Lean, quality is often considered to be “good parts”. That is important because quality parts are a necessary condition to create flow. In a broader sense, quality has several different meanings. Conformance to Spec. Does the product do what it says it will do? Does it match the physical Read more…