Customer-Centric Risk Management Via Hoshin Planning

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The new millennium brought a great deal of change in the marketplace. As the financial scandals of the 1990s came to light, new regulations were drafted and put into place to avoid such occurrences in the future. U.S. financial institutions must comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which came...

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Making the Best Use of Process Improvement Consulting

How often do organizations that have a dedicated team or group working full-time on quality initiatives under the name of Six Sigma, or Lean, or Business Excellence or Service Quality and at the same time the strategic major projects like business reengineering, restructuring, revenue enhancements are outsourced to...

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Seven Basic Tools of Quality

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The Seven Basic Tools of Quality (also known as 7 QC Tools) originated in Japan when the country was undergoing major quality revolution and had become a mandatory topic as part of Japanese’s industrial training program. These tools which comprised of simple graphical and statistical techniques were helpful...

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Six Sigma: Three Deadly Sins In Strategic Planning

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When clients are not getting the results they expect from their strategic plans, I often see three overlooked causes – incomplete planning, inadequate links between strategy and action, and poor communications. This is not to say that there are not other problems. But these three seem to be...

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Is Your Organization Ready to Implement Six Sigma?

Many companies have jumped on the Six Sigma bandwagon hoping to emulate the success of such industry leaders as AlliedSignal, GE and Motorola. However, deployment of Six Sigma is not an easy task and does not necessarily translate into instant results. A successful implementation depends on many factors,...

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Making the Business Case for a Six Sigma Deployment

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Many quality managers have read about and seen the benefits of Six Sigma but are unsure how to approach their senior leadership about the opportunity because they do not have a concise package of information to convey. Fortunately, there is a series of tried and true steps which...

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Which one is a better course, PMP or PMI-ACP?

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PMP (Project Management Professional) & ACP (Agile Certified Practitioners) are two certifications offered by PMI in two different areas i.e. PMP is more towards traditional project management with a bigger horizon whereas ACP with an agile focus. Even though these are two different dimensions aspirants are confused which...

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A Study of Estimates of Sigma in Small Sample Sizes

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This paper looks at some of the methods of estimating standard deviation (which I will usually refer to as ‘sigma’). Additionally, I propose a new formula for estimating sigma for small sample sizes and also present a means to mathematically evaluate these competing estimates of sigma. The question...

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