Across the country, hundreds of thousands of drivers deliver packages and parcels to customers and companies each day, with many click-to-door times averaging only a few days.

Deming Prize recipient Ryuji Fukuda introduced a document to my company in 1989 referred to as the “X-Type Matrix for Objective Management.” Relatively unknown at the time, it’s since become a popular format for strategy deployment.

This article is an excerpt from the cutting room floor.

I was asked to lead a workshop in the sales order department of a manufacturer that we had helped with process improvement on the factory floor. Those efforts had positively reverberated across the company in the form of fewer late and expedited orders.

Amid seemingly never-ending layoffs and a laser focus on

Sometimes the key to getting a lot done is to actually do nothing at all.

Pay. It’s the topic we love to avoid. We don’t discuss it with friends or family. It’s verboten at cocktail parties. Heck, we discuss cancer, religion, and abortion at dinner parties more easily than we talk about our paychecks.

In less than two months we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of the control chart, a tool most often associated with statistical process control (SPC). Considering SPC from our modern perspective made us ask, “Is SPC still relevant?”

Companies today implementing automated compliance management systems are motivated by a wide variety of factors.

When presented with a collection of data from operations or production, many will start their analysis by computing descriptive statistics and fitting a probability model to the data. But before you do this, there’s an easy test that you need to perform.