Semir Mohamed
11-29-08
Total Quality Management
“Best practices can be defined as the most efficient and effective methods of accomplishing a task or achieving a goal, based on repeatable procedures that have proven themselves over time for large numbers of organizations. “ Engle p. 1. In Engle’s article “validating best practice.” A company needed to develop a list of best practice for a portion of its business that was not performing well. After high level analysis, he found that the company was expending four to five times the typical amount of resources to perform each transaction. In addition, there were significant risks of error involved with their current procedure. So Engle came up with ways to improve their practices.
Engle’s suggested improvement activities which include: benchmarking, kaizen events, waste elimination and a combination of all these activities. He explains ways to improve certain processes quickly and at relativity low cost. For example, there was a company that had an improvement concern about the introduction of automation to replace highly manual processes. Manual processes can add significant risk and expense to operations. Furthermore, capturing information electronically provides fast and efficient processing as well as reporting and monitoring capabilities. He recommended to the client to redesign process to incorporate web-based software that can be purchased on a per-transaction based with few or none of the associated implementations or fixed asset expenses.
The second article is about Professor Robert S. Kaplan the man that came up with the six ways to improve the way business is handled. The six ...