The most stunning accomplishment of Toyota during the last 50 years is its turnaround from making “junk” to virtually redefining quality in the auto industry. Toyota was influenced to the core by W. Edwards Deming and quality is evident everywhere in the company.

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I’ve now been continuously thinking about lean for 30 years, since the fall of 1979 when my bosses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) asked me to explore how a few Japanese companies had developed a striking advantage in designing and making motor ve

These days, there must be people at Toyota waking up in a cold sweat from dreams in which they are being scolded by Taiichi Ohno, furious at the massive vehicle recalls caused ostensibly by the pursuit of scale and volume production at the expense of quality.

Courses in statistics generally emphasize the problem of inference.

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It’s better to measure things when we can; that’s been well-established in the quality literature over the years. The use of go/no-go gauges will always provide much less information for improvement than measuring the pieces themselves.

Vantage Mobility International (VMI) is well on its way to achieving its goal: to become the No. 1 provider of personal mobility transportation solutions by the end of 2010.

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Lean Six Sigma methodologies have been around since Henry Ford’s creation of the assembly line in the early 1900s.