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…
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…
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…
In December 1997, members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiated the Kyoto Protocol that established emissions reductions for the developed and developing nations that ratified the Protocol. The Protocol went into force in February 2005 after Russia ratified it in November 2004. The U.S. did not ratify the Protocol because it set no emission limits for China or India. The Kyoto Protocol…
Whenever I think of the multitude of phone companies today, I remember that once upon a time, there was ONE phone company. Yes, one – “Ma Bell”. On the AT&T website, they proudly post this fact: “For much of its history, AT&T and its Bell System functioned as a legally sanctioned, regulated monopoly.” While on paper this makes a degree…
