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(Publisher’s Note: This article, is reprinted with permission from THE INFORMED OUTLOOK, in which it first appeared in Nov. 2003.)
Following the ISO 9001:2000 transition, the future of quality management continues to align with that of business management. The challenge in both cases is for…
Ronald Ames
As a methodology, Six Sigma has been around since the 1980s. Yet it took a couple of U.S. industry giants, Allied Signal and GE, to draw the world’s attention to the benefits the program offers businesses. Even so, many companies fail to integrate Six Sigma into their corporate cultures due to a…
Kamal Hassan
Would you spend millions of dollars for a return of more than a billion? Sure you would, but that’s just a fantasy, right? It wasn’t just a pipedream for GE’s CEO Jack Welch, who expected to reap a hefty return for every dollar his company spent on Six Sigma. Needless to say, he did. In 1997, GE…
Rick Beaver
Would you spend millions of dollars for a return of more than a billion? Sure you would, but that’s just a fantasy, right? It wasn’t just a pipedream for GE’s CEO Jack Welch, who expected to reap a hefty return for every dollar his company spent on Six Sigma. Needless to say, he did. In 1997, GE…
Howard Cooper
To succeed in our increasingly competitive global economy, many companies have implemented lean manufacturing, a step beyond just-in-time production systems. Other companies claim they’re "lean" but hedge on the concept. They maintain work-in-progress inventories because they fear the consequences…
John Nycz
Jack Welch had a unique vision of an organization that made data-based decisions. At times his tactics for bringing this about were described as “violent,” “abrupt” and “painful,” but his methods worked. GE’s transformation is still a modern model of how to make quantum shifts in the way a huge…