Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Quality Solutions in Unexpected Places

Don’t tell me this has never happened to you. You’re away from the office—at home, at the store, at a sporting event, at your children’s school—and you spot a situation where a quality tool would really come in handy. 
Or, you find that a quality tool is being used, quite unknowingly.
Two ASQ Influential Voices bloggers wrote about this phenomenon.
Hearing about the lights outage during this year’s Superbowl in the U.S., John Priebe immediately thought of how the Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) could have helped uncover potential problems in the power supply before the big game.
And a few years ago, Mark Graban, author of Lean Blog, wrote about a wine bar server who developed an informal way to keep track of which wines were being poured. This helped the server to reduce errors and be more efficient. The server called her method a “lazy” way of keeping track of customer orders. Using lean terminology, Mark called it “mistake proofing” in this clever post entitled “Kaizen” Improvement at a Wine Bar—“Lazy” or Smart?
Have you spotted a non-work situation that could use a quality tool? Or how about a quality solution in a surprising place?

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