Mission Accomplished…
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion on “Operational Improvement and the Potential that can be Realized” at the Association for Corporate Growth’s (2nd Annual Manufacturing & Logistics Conference” at theWestchester Country Club The conference kicked-off with a keynote address from Matt “Boom” Daniel, the owner of Business Battlefield, a…
Spending Green to Go Green
“Green is the new black,” but businesses are finding it’s an easy way to put them in the red. What did you do to celebrate Earth Day? Admittedly, I neglected to do much about it myself – unless you count noticing the “Google Doodle” that morning… One of the biggest pushes in our culture recently is the…
Failure Is the Highway to Success: Getting It Right
Many times, regardless of how well we plan, some things just fail. Maybe it’s a webinar or a meeting presentation that was well prepared for, but suffered technical difficulty; maybe a savings plan losing nearly half of its value in today’s recession. These challenging situations define our days, but our responses to them determine our future…
The Manual Pareto Chart
When was the last time you created a Pareto chart manually? For those of you not familiar with a “Pareto ” chart, it is simply a bar chart that organizes the categories from highest-to-lowest in frequency of occurrence. Pareto charts are useful when “issues” outnumber the resources available to solve them; obviously, you would want to put the resources on the…
Histograms – 101: See the Quality…
An important aspect of total quality is the identification and control of all the sources of variation so that processes produce essentially the same result again and again. At a glance, a histogram is a tool that allows you to understand a variation that exists in a process. Although the histogram is essentially a bar chart,…
Absinthe, the “Green Fairy”, and Operational Excellence
XONITEK-US and XONITEK-UK recently hosted an Operational Excellence Summit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. If you have ever been to Amsterdam, you will know there are distinct cultural differences which are quite obvious if you are from New York – even from a pre-Giuliani New York. From each place I visit, I’ve always liked to acquire artifacts…