Process Improvement is the job of examining the processes used in a company, department, project, etc. to see how they can be made more effective.
A flowchart is an outline or schematic drawing of the process your team is trying to measure or improve. It can also be a picture of an ideal process that you would like to use. Process mapping with flowcharts can help people: Agree on the steps of a process and the order in which they occur See…
ByEd Giles
Have you noticed the plethora of web apps lately? Whether you need something for your desktop or your mobile device, it seems that no matter what the situation, a web app can be procured to handle it. Lately, the mobile market has been the target of most of the web apps that we are becoming familiar…
An important aspect of total quality is the identification and control of all the sources of variation so that processes produce essentially the same result again and again. At a glance, a histogram is a tool that allows you to understand a variation that exists in a process. Although the histogram is essentially a bar…
The Misconception of Reliability and Availability After a 10 year reliability journey that takes me across the appliances, power generation, aerospace, component placement, electronics design, wireless, and finally the cable industries, I would like to share my astonishing discovery with my friends and foes alike. My focus will be on the cable industry where my recent…
Are your call center costs way too high? Are your customers’ experiences way too low? Poor customer care is not only pervasive and widely publicized, but seems to be getting worse. Witness the recent uproars about Dell Computer and AOL. More and more I have seen clients that are frantic, though internally focused, saying, “Our budget for handling…
I have been reading countless articles, and listening to as many newscasts, that all forecast a dismal Holiday season for retailers. And it seems that every retailer is warning their investors to prepare for the worst: lower overall sales, lower margins, lower same-store sales, etc… The news is grim, as customers reportedly tighten their purse-strings…
