Modern Management: concepts and skills, 14/e

The Quality Improvement Process

Two approaches may be taken to improve quality. The first approach, advocated by most of the quality experts, can be described as “incremental improvement”—or improving one thing at a time. Actually, many incremental improvements may be undertaken simultaneously throughout an organization; for example, in 1982 Toyota averaged instituting 5,000 improvements per day.

The second approach, advocated by Michael Hammer, consists of completely reengineering a process.42 This approach requires starting with a clean slate in which management looks at operations and asks, “If we were to start over today, how would we do this?”

Each approach is discussed in detail in the following sections.

The Incremental Improvement Process ...