Abstract: Most enterprises fight fires with axes, fire hoses, trucks, and hordes of firemen, but the CDQM approach is a smoke detector. It’s far less expensive to put a fire out when it’s just smoldering, rather than to extinguish a blazing house fire and then remodel the entire house.

Abstract: Six Sigma Quality is a popular approach to process improvement, particularly among technology driven companies such as Allied Signal, General Electric, Kodak and Texas Instruments. Its objective is to reduce output variability through process improvement, and/or to increase customer specification limits through design for producibility. I don't like the Six Sigma metric. As you'll see, it fails to pass many of the empirical tests for

Abstract: Current manufacturing practices have been made cumbersome by the imposition of data recording activities required by manufacturing systems through the release, issuing, and expediting of the infamous work order. An integrated lean system utilizes full containers to signal the completion of product and backflushes the component material within the ERP system. Additionally, the integrated lean system (pull) can work simultaneously and in harmony with your MRP planning (push) to schedule your shop floor bottlenecks so that the bottleneck becomes the heartbeat (pull) for the remainder of the plant. Although originally scheduled, the bottleneck may use the integrated lean backflush routines as well! This white paper defines the integrated lean environment.