and keywords 5S Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize and Sustain ASQ America Society for Quality DfSS Design for Six Sigma ECQA European Certification & Qualification Association EQF European Qualifications Framework JIT Just In Time LSS Lean Six Sigma LSSA Lean Six Sigma Academy SGA Small Group Activities TOC Theory Of Constraints TPM Total Productive Maintenance TPS Toyota Production System V...

As software development evolves toward more agile methodologies (SCRUM, XP, RUP), engineering best practices become key to ensuring the delivery of high quality software that best meets a customer’s needs. This paper will briefly introduce agile methodologies and the best practices that facilitate successful agile implementations. It will focus on software configuration management (SCM) practic...

To be successful in the future a global marketer must develop an excellent quality management system that can impress consumers and continuously provide excellent quality products in a timely manner through corporate management for manufacturing in the 21st century. The author proposes a Global Quality Management System for transforming technology called “New JIT, new management technology prin...

The Toyota Production System (TPS) has continually inspired scholars of production management to a search for its essence. Two new interpretations have recently been advanced. Firstly, Johnston has argued that conventional production management is based on an approach to management called management-as-planning. The central assumption is that intentional activity is based on a representation of...

Purpose Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) within the construction sector are highly vulnerable to disruptions caused by political economic decisions or even pandemics. This study evaluated current operations of selected SMEs providing engineering design consultancy services against Toyota Production System (TPS) lean tool. The purpose is juxtapose SME processes with TPS ascertain level...

Medication errors occurring in hospitals are a growing national concern. These medication errors and their related costs (or wastes) are seen as major factors leading to increased patient safety risks and increased waste in the hospital setting. This article presents a study in which sixteen entry-level nurses utilized a Toyota Production System (TPS) analysis procedure to solve medication deli...

There is a growing national concern that health care organizations do not have a sound operating system in place. Reforming the operating system has assumed significance because of increasing operating costs and diminishing reimbursements from the payers. Critics argue that in the last 100 years or so significant strides have been made in product innovation but very little in process innovation...

This explorative study investigates the phenomenon of the company-specific production system (XPS). It has been a strong and recent trend across many manufacturing industries to develop and deploy such corporate improvement programmes. Five propositions regarding the uniqueness of XPSs are derived from universalistic versus contingent perspectives on improvement programmes. The main XPS princip...

The survival of any organization depends upon its competitive edge. Even though Lean is one of the most powerful quality improvement methodologies, nearly two-thirds of the Lean implementations results in failures and less than one-fifth of those implemented have sustained results. One of the most significant tasks of top management is to identify, understand and deploy the significant Lean pra...

Executive Overview Toyota’s Production System (TPS) is based on “lean” principles including a focus on the customer, continual improvement and quality through waste reduction, and tightly integrated upstream and downstream processes as part of a lean value chain. Most manufacturing companies have adopted some type of “lean initiative,” and the lean movement recently has gone beyond the shop flo...