B2.1-History of Quality & Continuous Improvement

Most of the techniques found in the Quality and Continuous Improvement toolbox have been around for some time.  This can be accredited to several professionals performing groundbreaking work in the Quality Sciences arena. 

Below is an infographic showing the historical timeline of integral quality professionals, their contributions along with major events, milestones and quality approaches that have shaped the quality arena. Next is a list of Quality Professionals and the tremendous contributions they have made to the industry.  After which is a listing of key Quality Approaches that have changed the way quality is framed and used.

Frederick W. Taylor

Instead of attending Harvard University, Taylor became an apprentice patternmaker and machinist, gaining shop-floor experience at Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philadelphia (a pump-manufacturing company whose proprietors were friends of the Taylor family). He left his apprenticeship for six months and represented a group of New England machine-tool manufacturers at Philadelphia’s centennial exposition. Taylor finished his four-year apprenticeship and in 1878 became a machine-shop laborer at Midvale Steel Works. At Midvale, he was quickly promoted to time clerk, journeyman machinist, gang boss over the lathe hands, machine shop foreman, research director, and finally chief engineer of the works (while maintaining his position as machine shop foreman). Taylor’s fast promotions reflected both his talent and his family’s relationship with Edward Clark, part owner of Midvale Steel.

Early on at Midvale, working as a laborer and machinist, Taylor recognized that workmen were working their machines, or themselves, not nearly as hard as they could (a practice that at the time was called “soldiering”) and that this resulted in high labor costs for the company. When he became a foreman he expected more output from the workmen. In order to determine how much work should properly be expected, he began to study and analyze the productivity of both the men and the machines (although the word “productivity” was not used at the time, and the applied science of productivity had not yet been developed). His focus on the human component of production Taylor labeled scientific management.

Taylor was a mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. He is regarded as the father of scientific management, and was one of the first management consultants and director of a famous firm. In Peter Drucker’s description, Frederick W. Taylor was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study. On Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ rests, above all, the tremendous surge of affluence in the last seventy-five years which has lifted the working masses in the developed countries well above any level recorded before, even for the well-to-do.

Taylor’s scientific management consisted of four principles:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
3. Provide “Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task”
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

Karl Pearson

Pearson’s thinking underpins many of the ‘classical’ statistical methods which are in common use today. Examples of his contributions are:

• Correlation coefficient. The correlation coefficient (first developed by Auguste Bravais and Francis Galton) was defined as a product-moment, and its relationship with linear regression was studied.
• Method of moments. Pearson introduced moments, a concept borrowed from physics, as descriptive statistics and for the fitting of distributions to samples.
• Pearson’s system of continuous curves. A system of continuous univariate probability distributions that came to form the basis of the now conventional continuous probability distributions. Since the system is complete up to the fourth moment, it is a powerful complement to the Pearsonian method of moments.
• Chi distance. A precursor and special case of the Mahalanobis distance.
• p-value. Defined as the probability measure of the complement of the ball with the hypothesized value as center point and chi distance as radius.
• Foundations of statistical hypothesis testing theory and statistical decision theory. In the seminal “On the criterion…” paper, Pearson proposed testing the validity of hypothesized values by evaluating the chi distance between the hypothesized and the empirically observed values via the p-value, which was proposed in the same paper. The use of preset evidence criteria, so called alpha type-I error probabilities, was later proposed by Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson.
• Pearson’s chi-squared test. A hypothesis test using normal approximation for discrete data.
• Principal component analysis. The method of fitting a linear subspace to multivariate data by minimizing the chi distances.
• The first introduction of the histogram is usually credited to Pearson.

Walter Shewhart

Later he applied his statistical methods to the final installation of central station switching systems, then to factory production. When Shewhart joined the Western Electric Company Inspection Engineering Department at the Hawthorne Works in 1918, industrial quality was limited to inspecting finished products and removing defective items. That all changed on May 16, 1924. Shewhart’s boss, George D. Edwards, recalled: “Dr. Shewhart prepared a little memorandum only about a page in length. About a third of that page was given over to a simple diagram which we would all recognize today as a schematic control chart. That diagram, and the short text which preceded it, set forth all of the essential principles and considerations which are involved in what we know today as process quality control.” Shewhart’s work pointed out the importance of reducing variation in a manufacturing process and the understanding that continual process-adjustment in reaction to non-conformance actually increased variation and degraded quality.

Shewhart framed the problem in terms of assignable-cause and chance-cause variation and introduced the control chart as a tool for distinguishing between the two. Shewhart stressed that bringing a production process into a state of statistical control, where there is only chance-cause variation, and keeping it in control, is necessary to predict future output and to manage a process economically. Dr. Shewhart created the basis for the control chart and the concept of a state of statistical control by carefully designed experiments. While Dr. Shewhart drew from pure mathematical statistical theories, he understood data from physical processes never produce a “normal distribution curve” (a Gaussian distribution, also commonly called a “bell curve”). He discovered that observed variation in manufacturing data did not always behave the same way as data in nature (Brownian motion of particles). Dr. Shewhart concluded that while every process displays variation, some processes display controlled variation that is natural to the process, while others display uncontrolled variation that is not present in the process causal system at all times.

Shewhart worked to advance the thinking at Bell Telephone Laboratories from their foundation in 1925 until his retirement in 1956, publishing a series of papers in the Bell System Technical Journal.

Shewhart’s charts were adopted by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) in 1933 and advocated to improve production during World War II in American War Standards Z1.1-1941, Z1.2-1941 and Z1.3-1942.

From the late 1930s onwards, Shewhart’s interests expanded out from industrial quality to wider concerns in science and statistical inference. The title of his second book, Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control (1939), asks the question: “What can statistical practice, and science in general, learn from the experience of industrial quality control?”

Shewhart’s approach to statistics was radically different from that of many of his contemporaries. He possessed a strong operationalist outlook, largely absorbed from the writings of pragmatist philosopher Clarence Irving Lewis, and this influenced his statistical practice. In particular, he had read Lewis’ Mind and the World Order many times. Though he lectured in England in 1932 under the sponsorship of Karl Pearson (another committed operationalist) his ideas attracted little enthusiasm within the English statistical tradition. The British Standards nominally based on his work, in fact, diverge on serious philosophical and methodological issues from his practice.

His more conventional work led him to formulate the statistical idea of tolerance intervals and to propose his data presentation rules, which are listed below:

1. Data have no meaning apart from their context.
2. Data contain both signal and noise. To be able to extract information, one must separate the signal from the noise within the data.

W. Edwards Deming

1. Create Consistency of Purpose for improvement of product and services.
2. Adopt a new philosophy.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag alone.  Instead, minimize total cost by working with a single supplier.
5. Improve constantly and forever every process for planning, production, and service.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Adopt and institute leadership.
8. Drive out fear.
9. Break down barriers between staff areas.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce.
11. Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management.
12. Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship.  Eliminate the annual rating or merit system.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation.

In his book The New Economics for Industry, Government, and Education Deming championed the work of Walter Shewhart, including statistical process control, operational definitions, and what Deming called the “Shewhart Cycle,” which had evolved into Plan-Do-check-Act (PDCA). Deming is best known for his work in Japan after WWII, particularly his work with the leaders of Japanese industry. That work began in July and August 1950, in Tokyo and at the Hakone Convention Center, when Deming delivered speeches on what he called “Statistical Product Quality Administration”. Many in Japan credit Deming as one of the inspirations for what has become known as the Japanese post-war economic miracle of 1950 to 1960, when Japan rose from the ashes of war on the road to becoming the second-largest economy in the world through processes partially influenced by the ideas Deming taught:

1. Better design of products to improve service
2. Higher level of uniform product quality
3. Improvement of product testing in the workplace and in research centers
4. Greater sales through side [global] markets

Deming is best known in the United States for his 14 Points (Out of the Crisis, by W. Edwards Deming) and his system of thought he called the “System of Profound Knowledge”. The system includes four components or “lenses” through which to view the world simultaneously:

1. Appreciating a system
2. Understanding variation
3. Psychology
4. Epistemology, the theory of knowledge

Deming made a significant contribution to Japan’s reputation for innovative, high-quality products, and for its economic power. He is regarded as having had more impact on Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual not of Japanese heritage. Despite being honored in Japan in 1951 with the establishment of the Deming Prize, he was only just beginning to win widespread recognition in the United States at the time of his death in 1993. President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Medal of Technology in 1987. The following year, the National Academy of Sciences gave Deming the Distinguished Career in Science award.

Joseph M. Juran

• Create awareness of the need and opportunity for improvement.
• Mandate quality improvement; make it a part of every job description.
• Create the infrastructure: Establish a quality council; select projects for improvement; appoint teams; provide facilitators.
• Provide training in how to improve quality.
• Review progress regularly.
• Give recognition to the winning teams.
• Propagandize the results.
• Revise the reward system to enforce the rate of improvement.
• Maintain momentum by enlarging the business plan to include goals for quality improvement.

In 1941, Juran came across the work of Vilfredo Pareto and began to apply the Pareto principle to quality issues (for example, 80% of a problem is caused by 20% of the causes). This is also known as “the vital few and the trivial many.” In later years, Juran preferred “the vital few and the useful many” to signal that the remaining 80% of the causes should not be totally ignored.

When he began his career in the 1920s, the principal focus in quality management was on the quality of the end, or finished, product. The tools used were from the Bell system of acceptance sampling, inspection plans, and control charts. The ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor dominated.

Juran is widely credited for adding the human dimension to quality management. He pushed for the education and training of managers. For Juran, human relations problems were the ones to isolate, and resistance to change was the root cause of quality issues. Juran credits Margaret Mead’s book Cultural Patterns and Technical Change for illuminating the core problem in reforming business quality. His book Managerial Breakthrough, published in 1964, outlined the issue.

Juran’s concept of quality management extended outside the walls of the factory to encompass nonmanufacturing processes, especially those that might be thought of as service related. For example, in an interview published in 1997 he observed:

The key issues facing managers in sales are no different than those faced by managers in other disciplines. Sales managers say they face problems such as “It takes us too long… we need to reduce the error rate.” They want to know, “How do customers perceive us?” These issues are no different than those facing managers trying to improve in other fields. The systematic approaches to improvement are identical. … There should be no reason our familiar principles of quality and process engineering would not work in the sales process.

Note that both Deming and Juran worked in both United States and in Japan to help businesses understand the importance of continuous improvement.

Philip B. Crosby

1. Make it clear that management is committed to quality.
2. Form quality improvement teams with representatives from each department.
3. Determine how to measure where current and potential quality problems lie.
4. Evaluate the cost of quality and explain its use as a management tool.
5. Raise the quality awareness and personal concern of all employees.
6. Take formal actions to correct problems identified through previous steps.
7. Establish a committee for the zero defects program.
8. Train all employees to actively carry out their part of the quality improvement program.
9. Hold a “Zero Defects Day” to let all employees realize that there has been a change.
10. Encourage individuals to establish improvement goals for themselves and their groups.
11. Encourage Employees to communicate to management the obstacles they face in attaining their improvement goals.
12. Recognize and appreciate those who participate.
13. Establish quality councils to communicate on a regular basis.
14. Do it all over again to emphasize that the quality improvement program never ends.

Armand V. Feigenbaum

His contributions to the quality body of knowledge include:

• “Total quality control is an effective system for integrating the quality development, quality maintenance, and quality improvement efforts of the various groups in an organization so as to enable production and service at the most economical levels which allow full customer satisfaction.”

• The concept of a “hidden” plant—the idea that so much extra work is performed in correcting mistakes that there is effectively a hidden plant within any factory.

• Accountability for quality: Because quality is everybody’s job, it may become nobody’s job—the idea that quality must be actively managed and have visibility at the highest levels of management.

• The concept of quality costs.

Taiichi Ohno

Born in 1912 in Dalian, China, and a graduate of the Nagoya Technical High School (Japan), he joined the Toyoda family’s Toyoda Spinning upon graduation in 1932 during the Great Depression thanks to the relations of his father to Kiichiro Toyoda, the son of Toyota’s founding father Sakichi Toyoda.  He moved to the Toyota motor company in 1943 where he worked as a shop-floor supervisor in the engine manufacturing shop of the plant, and gradually rose through the ranks to become an executive.

Ohno’s principles influenced areas outside of manufacturing, and have been extended into the service arena. For example, the field of sales process engineering has shown how the concept of Just In Time (JIT) can improve sales, marketing, and customer service processes.

Ohno was also instrumental in developing the way organizations identify waste, with his “Seven Wastes” model which have become core in many academic approaches. These wastes are:

1. Delay, waiting or time spent in a queue with no value being added
2. Producing more than you need
3. Over processing or undertaking non-value added activity
4. Transportation
5. Unnecessary movement or motion
6. Inventory
7. Defects in the Product.

Ohno is also known for his “Ten Precepts” to think and act to win.

1. You are a cost. First reduce waste.
2. First say, “I can do it.” And try before everything.
3. The workplace is a teacher. You can find answers only in the workplace.
4. Do anything immediately. Starting something right now is the only way to win.
5. Once you start something, persevere with it. Do not give up until you finish it.
6. Explain difficult things in an easy-to-understand manner. Repeat things that are easy to understand.
7. Waste is hidden. Do not hide it. Make problems visible.
8. Valueless motions are equal to shortening one’s life.
9. Re-improve what was improved for further improvement.
10. Wisdom is given equally to everybody. The point is whether one can exercise it.

Kaoru Ishikawa

After becoming a full professor in the engineering faculty at the University of Tokyo (1960), Ishikawa introduced the concept of quality circles (1962) in conjunction with JUSE. This concept began as an experiment to see what effect the “leading hand” (Gemba-cho) could have on quality. It was a natural extension of these forms of training to all levels of an organization (the top and middle managers having already been trained). Although many companies were invited to participate, only one company at the time, Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, accepted. Quality circles would soon become very popular and form an important link in a company’s Total Quality Management system. Ishikawa would write two books on quality circles (QC Circle Koryo and How to Operate QC Circle Activities).

Among his efforts to promote quality were the Annual Quality Control Conference for Top Management (1963) and several books on quality control (the Guide to Quality Control (1968) contained the first published example of a Pareto chart.) He was the chairman of the editorial board of the monthly Statistical Quality Control. Ishikawa was involved in international standardization activities.

Genichi Taguchi

However, Taguchi realized that in much industrial production, there is a need to produce an outcome on target, for example, to machine a hole to a specified diameter, or to manufacture a cell to produce a given voltage. He also realized, as had Walter A. Shewhart and others before him, that excessive variation lay at the root of poor manufactured quality and that reacting to individual items inside and outside specification was counterproductive.

He therefore argued that quality engineering should start with an understanding of quality costs in various situations. In much conventional industrial engineering, the quality costs are simply represented by the number of items outside specification multiplied by the cost of rework or scrap. However, Taguchi insisted that manufacturers broaden their horizons to consider cost to society. Though the short-term costs may simply be those of non-conformance, any item manufactured away from nominal would result in some loss to the customer or the wider community through early wear-out; difficulties in interfacing with other parts, themselves probably wide of nominal; or the need to build in safety margins. These losses are externalities and are usually ignored by manufacturers, which are more interested in their private costs than social costs. Such externalities prevent markets from operating efficiently, according to analyses of public economics. Taguchi argued that such losses would inevitably find their way back to the originating corporation (in an effect similar to the tragedy of the commons), and that by working to minimize them, manufacturers would enhance brand reputation, win markets and generate profits.

Such losses are, of course, very small when an item is near to negligible. Donald J. Wheeler characterized the region within specification limits as where we deny that losses exist. As we diverge from nominal, losses grow until the point where losses are too great to deny and the specification limit is drawn. All these losses are, as W. Edwards Deming would describe them, unknown and unknowable, but Taguchi wanted to find a useful way of representing them statistically. Taguchi specified three situations:

1. Larger the better (for example, agricultural yield);
2. Smaller the better (for example, carbon dioxide emissions); and
3. On-target, minimum-variation (for example, a mating part in an assembly).

The first two cases are represented by simple monotonic loss functions. In the third case, Taguchi adopted a squared-error loss function for several reasons:

• It is the first “symmetric” term in the Taylor series expansion of real analytic loss-functions.
• Total loss is measured by the variance. For uncorrelated random variables, as variance is additive the total loss is an additive measurement of cost.
• The squared-error loss function is widely used in statistics, following Gauss’s use of the squared-error loss function in justifying the method of least squares.

Shigeo Shingo

Shingo may well be known better in the West than in Japan, as a result of his meeting Norman Bodek, an American entrepreneur and founder of Productivity Inc. In 1981 Bodek travelled to Japan to learn about the Toyota Production System, coming across books by Shingō, who as an external consultant had been teaching Industrial engineering courses at Toyota since 1955. Since 1947, Shingō had been involved all over Japan in the training of thousands of people, who joined his courses on the fundamental techniques of analysis and improvement of the operational activities in factories (among which the P-Course, or Production Course).

Shingō had written his Study of the Toyota Production System in Japanese and had it translated into English in 1980. Bodek took as many copies of this book as he could to the USA and arranged to translate Shingo’s other books into English, eventually having his original study re-translated. Bodek also brought Shingō to lecture in the USA and developed one of the first Western lean manufacturing consultancy practices with Shingō’s support.

The relevance of his contribution has sometimes been doubted, but it is substantially confirmed by the opinions of his contemporaries, many saw him even as a contributor to the fundamental concepts of TPS, such as Just in time, and the “pull” production system, which were created by Toyota and Mr. Taiichi Ohno and still remain a strong logical and practical basis for the lean production and lean thinking management approaches. The myth prevails that Shingo invented the Toyota Production System but what can be stated is that he did document the system. Shingo contributed to the formalization of some aspects of the management philosophy known as the Toyota Production System (TPS), developed and applied in Japan since the 1950s and later implemented in a huge number of companies in the world.

In 1988, the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University recognized Dr. Shingō for his lifetime accomplishments and created the Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence that recognizes world-class, lean organizations and operational excellence.

The theorist of important innovations related to Industrial engineering, such as Poka-yoke and the Zero Quality Control, Shingō could influence fields other than manufacturing. For example, his concepts of SMED, mistake-proofing, and “zero quality control” (eliminating the need for inspection of results) have all been applied in the sales process engineering.

Shingo was the author of several books including: A Study of the Toyota Production System; Revolution in Manufacturing: The SMED System; Zero Quality Control: Source Inspection and the Poka-yoke System; The Sayings of Shigeo Shingo: Key Strategies for Plant Improvement; Non-Stock Production: The Shingo System for Continuous Improvement and The Shingo Production Management System: Improving Process Functions.

James P. Womack

Womack received his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago in 1970. He earned his master’s degree in transportation systems in 1975 at Harvard University. His Ph.D. in political science was received from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982 for a dissertation on the comparison of industrial policy in the United States, Germany and Japan.

From 1975-1991 Womack led a number of comparative studies on worldwide production practices. The study of the automotive industry (the International Motor Vehicle Program – IMVP), funded with more than US$5 million, was the most important. Womack left MIT shortly after the publication of his book and founded the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) in 1997.

In addition, he also founded the Lean Global Network (LGN) together with Dr. Bodo Wiegand and José Ferro, which combines the interests and objectives of the Lean Management Community. The umbrella organization wants to ensure uniform standards when implementing learning concepts and to encourage the exchange among its members.

John Fransis Mitchell & William B. Smith, Jr.

In the late 1970s, as John F. Mitchell was on the ascendancy to being named President and COO in 1980, he was joined by other senior managers, notably, CEO Bob Galvin, Jack Germain, and Art Sundry who worked in John F. Mitchell’s pager organization to set the quality bar 10 times higher. Sundry was reputed to have shouted “Our quality stinks” at an organizational meeting attended by Galvin, John F. Mitchell and other senior executives; and Sundry got to keep his job.  But most importantly, the breakthroughs occurred when it was recognized that intensified focus and improved measurements, data collection, and more disciplined statistical approaches John F. Mitchell’s untiring efforts, and support from Motorola engineers and senior management, prevailed and brought Japanese quality control methods back to the USA, and resulted in a significant and permanent change in culture at Motorola. “We ought to be better than we are,” said Germain, director of Quality Improvement.  The culmination of Motorola quality engineering efforts occurred in 1986, with the help of an outside quality control consultant who joined Motorola, Bill Smith when the Motorola University and Six-Sigma Institute was founded. Two years later, in 1988, Motorola received the coveted Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which is given by the president of the United State.

Brief History of Quality Approaches

Below lists out a brief chart showing the key quality approaches over time. This is not an exhaustive list but does cover the key approaches that made impactful change as it relates to quality.

Quality Approach	Approximate Time Frame	Short Description
Quality Circles	1979-1981	Quality improvement or self-improvement study groups composed of a small number of employees (10 or fewer) and their supervisor.  Quality circles originated in Japan, where they were called quality control circles.
Statistical Process Control (SPC)	Mid-1980’s	The application of statistical techniques to control a process.  Also called “Statistical Quality Control”. Originated by Walter Shewhart in 1930, was further developed and integrated in the 1980’s.
TQM	1984-1995	Total quality management (TQM) consists of organization-wide efforts to “install and make permanent climate where employees continuously improve their ability to provide on demand products and services that customers will find of particular value.”  “Total” emphasizes that departments in addition to production (for example sales and marketing, accounting and finance, engineering and design) are obligated to improve their operations; “management” emphasizes that executives are obligated to actively manage quality through funding, training, staffing, and goal setting. While there is no widely agreed-upon approach, TQM efforts typically draw heavily on the previously developed tools and techniques of quality control. TQM enjoyed widespread attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s before being overshadowed by ISO 9000, Lean manufacturing, and Six Sigma.
Theory of Constraints	1984-Present	The Theory of Constraints (TOC) is a management paradigm that views any manageable system as being limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints. There is always at least one constraint, and TOC uses a focusing process to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of the organization around it. TOC adopts the common idiom “a chain is no stronger than its weakest link”. This means that processes, organizations, etc., are vulnerable because the weakest person or part can always damage or break them or at least adversely affect the outcome.
Six Sigma	1986-Present	Six Sigma (6σ) is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. It was introduced by American engineer Bill Smith while working at Motorola in 1986.  A six-sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of all opportunities to produce some features of a part are statistically expected to be free of defects.   Six Sigma strategies seek to improve manufacturing quality by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. It does this by using empirical and statistical quality management methods and by hiring people who serve as Six Sigma experts. Each Six Sigma project follows a defined methodology and has specific value targets, such as reducing pollution or increasing customer satisfaction.   The term Six Sigma originates from statistical modeling of manufacturing processes. The maturity of a manufacturing process can be described by a sigma rating indicating its yield or the percentage of defect-free products it creates—specifically, to within how many standard deviations of a normal distribution the fraction of defect-free outcomes corresponds.
ISO 9000	1987-Present	A set of international standards on quality management and quality assurance developed to help companies effectively document the quality system elements to be implemented to maintain an efficient quality system.
Baldrige Award Criteria	1987-Present	An award established by the US Congress in 1987 to raise awareness of quality management and recognize US companies that have implemented successful quality management systems.
Benchmarking	1988-1996	An improvement process in which a company measures its performance against that of best-in-class companies, determines how those companies achieved their performance levels, and uses the information to improve its own performance.  The subjects that can be benchmarked include strategies, operations, processes and procedures.
Shingo Prize	1988-Present	The Shingo Prize is an award given to organizations worldwide by the Shingo Institute. In order to be selected as a recipient of the Shingo Prize, an organization “challenges,” or applies for the award, by first submitting an achievement report that provides data about recent business improvements and accomplishments. Then the organization undergoes an onsite assessment performed by Shingo Institute examiners. Organizations are scored relative to how closely their improvements match the ideal as defined by the Shingo Model. Organizations that meet the criteria are awarded the Shingo Prize.   According to the Shingo Institute, the Shingo Prize “is the world’s highest standard for organizational excellence” and “a worldwide recognized symbol of an organization’s successful establishment of a culture anchored on principles of continuous improvement.” These principles are part of the Shingo Model.
Balanced Scorecard	1990-Present	A management concept that helps managers at all levels monitor their results in their key areas.
Reengineering	1996-1997	A breakthrough approach involving the restructuring of an entire organization and its processes.
Lean Manufacturing	1996-Present	Lean manufacturing (also known as lean production, just-in-time manufacturing and just-in-time production, or JIT) is a production method aimed primarily at reducing times within the production system as well as response times from suppliers and to customers.   It is derived from Toyota’s 1930 operating model “The Toyota Way” (Toyota Production System, TPS).  The term “Lean” was coined in 1988 by John Krafcik, and defined in 1996 by James Womack and Daniel Jones to consist of five key principles: “Precisely specify value by specific product, identify the value stream for each product, make value flow without interruptions, let customer pull value from the producer, and pursue perfection.”  Companies employ the strategy to increase efficiency. By receiving goods only as they need them for the production process, it reduces inventory costs and wastage, and increases productivity and profit. The downside is that it requires producers to forecast demand accurately as the benefits can be nullified by minor delays in the supply chain. It may also impact negatively on workers due to added stress and inflexible conditions. A successful operation depends on a company having regular outputs, high-quality processes, and reliable suppliers.
Agile Manufacturing	2001-Present	In software development, Agile practices involve discovering requirements and developing solutions through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer(s)/end user(s).  It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continual improvement, and it encourages flexible responses to change.   It was popularized by the 2001 Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The values and principles espoused in this manifesto were derived from and underpin a broad range of software development frameworks, including Scrum and Kanban.   While there is much anecdotal evidence that adopting agile practices and values improves the agility of software professionals, teams and organizations, the empirical evidence is mixed and hard to find.
Lean-Six Sigma	2002-Present	Lean Six Sigma is a method that relies on a collaborative team effort to improve performance by systematically removing waste and reducing variation. It combines lean manufacturing/lean enterprise and Six Sigma to eliminate the eight kinds of waste (Muda): Defects, Over-Production, Waiting, Non-Utilized Talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, and Extra-Processing.   Lean Six Sigma is used to reduce process defects and waste, and to provide a framework for overall organizational culture change. Through the introduction of Lean Six Sigma, employers hope to change the mindset of employees and managers to one that focuses on growth and continuous improvement through process optimization. This change in culture and the mindset of an organization can potentially maximize efficiency and increase profitability.   In order to implement Lean Six Sigma, a combination of tools from both lean manufacturing and Six Sigma are necessary.  Some of these tools include kaizen, value-stream mapping, line balancing, and visual management.