These two volumes are about understanding—why—and application—how—with the aim of providing guidance and introduction to both. Quality is the consistent achievement of the user’s expectations of a product or service. The achievement needs to be “The right thing, right first time, every time, in time.” Beginning with manufacturing and services, it also includes professional, personal, and spiritual dimensions. Variation does not sit happily with consistency and skill in handling risk and opportunity requires competence in the use of statistics, probability, and uncertainty; and needs to complement the critically essential soft dimensions of quality and the overarching and underpinning primacy of personal relationships. There are no clear boundaries to the applicability of quality and the related processes and procedures expressed in management systems, and this is why it matters so much to show “how it applies in diverse business and social environments.” Increasingly, the acceptability of boundaries that are drawn depends on their effect on the user and the achievement of quality, and the latest standards on quality management are explicit on this key point. Quality is everyone’s business, and there is no single professional discipline that can properly express this. Insights, knowledge, experience, best practice, tools, and techniques need to be shared across all kinds of organizational and professional boundaries, and there is no departmental boundary that can stand apart from the organization-wide commitment to quality achievement.

These two volumes are about understanding—why—and application—how—with the aim of providing guidance and introduction to both. Quality is the consistent achievement of the user’s expectations of a product or service. The achievement needs to be “The right thing, right first time, every time, in time.” Beginning with manufacturing and services, it also includes professional, personal, and spiritual dimensions. Variation does not sit happily with consistency and skill in handling risk and opportunity requires competence in the use of statistics, probability, and uncertainty; and needs to complement the critically essential soft dimensions of quality and the overarching and underpinning primacy of personal relationships. There are no clear boundaries to the applicability of quality and the related processes and procedures expressed in management systems, and this is why it matters so much to show “how it applies in diverse business and social environments.” Increasingly, the acceptability of boundaries that are drawn depends on their effect on the user and the achievement of quality, and the latest standards on quality management are explicit on this key point. Quality is everyone’s business, and there is no single professional discipline that can properly express this. Insights, knowledge, experience, best practice, tools, and techniques need to be shared across all kinds of organizational and professional boundaries, and there is no departmental boundary that can stand apart from the organization-wide commitment to quality achievement.

Through this book, practitioners will obtain valuable new insights and examples of implementable frameworks and methods for managing their supply chain functions and organizations. The critical role that supply chain planning contributes to a firm’s financial well-being has never been greater. All too often, however, considerable managerial resources are directed toward planning activities with minimal results. In this book, we present proven, practical management frameworks used by the authors to support supply chain operations management and planning in private industry. These frameworks provide methodologies for managing critical activities such as supply chain strategic planning and project selection, manufacturing and distribution planning, performance measurement, supply chain risk management, and customer logistics and inventory deployment. This book is intended for supply chain professionals, as well as for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Practitioners will obtain valuable new insights and examples of implementable frameworks and methods for managing their supply chain functions and organizations. Students will develop an understanding of real-world approaches for supply chain planning, decision support, and many other key activities.

Process Improvement to Company Enrichment: An Integrated Strategy presents a unique, proven methodology for achieving an environment of innovation. This book details a comprehensive and integrated approach to optimization: acting strategically; refining business processes; energizing personnel development; forging reasoned technology decisions; and synchronizing corporate governance, organizational design, and company culture. Practices and principles are delivered in a conversational tone and are accompanied by intriguing historical anecdotes that entertain and help illustrate the authors' position points for each chapter–making for an interesting read. Whether the goal is improving select aspects of your company or totally rethinking the business model, this book furnishes the roadmap for achieving that successful transformation.

This book discusses the ways in which procurement can help to provide an ethical and sustainable approach to business and product creation while raising an awareness of unacceptable practices with a view to their eradication. This book demonstrates and explains how to best conduct yourself in a procurement role and what challenges you should be aware of. Factors such as being aware of modern slavery, supply chain’s pollution emissions, and opportunities to recycle and reuse will be explored to create an understanding for the reader in how value should be achieved in today’s way of managing procurement. As you make your way through the book you will learn about tools and techniques that can aid you in making the right decision for you and your organization, to ensure that all ethical and sustainable elements of the procurement process are explored, evaluated, reviewed and documented. This book discusses the ways in which procurement can help to provide an ethical and sustainable approach to business and product creation while raising an awareness of unacceptable practices with a view to their eradication. You, the reader, will learn more about the authors honest experiences of working in procurement as you progress through her literary work. At the end of each chapter, she provides a mini case study exploring and explaining some of her purchasing stories that she has collated over the years.

This book takes readers inside Chinese organizations and shows how factories are built, labor is managed, goods are sourced, quality is controlled, and logistics are handled. Leading business schools routinely offer undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in operations and supply chain management. Yet 200,000 U.S. jobs in supply chain management go unfilled each year owing to lack of talent. The talent that U.S. companies need, and that this book provides, is understanding how to make and buy products from China. How important is China to U.S. operations? In 2018, U.S. imports from China reached $600 billion. Half of these imports were bought by U.S. manufacturers. A dependency on Chinese goods is even greater when looking at U.S. supply chains. Sixty cents of every dollar that U.S. consumers spend on goods made in China go to U.S. workers and companies. Successful operations and supply chain managers understand manufacturing in China. This book takes readers inside Chinese organizations and shows how factories are built, labor is managed, goods are sourced, quality is controlled, and logistics are handled. Through this immersion experience, readers are able to see the opportunities and pitfalls in manufacturing in China.

Why do companies exert high effort to reduce the costs of products that are production? Because they can! Because unnecessary product costs were not removed during product development. C-O-S-T, short for Cost Optimization System and Technique, details how a company’s product development teams, their supporting functions, and company leaders can optimize product costs before production starts and thereby maximize lifecycle profits. Since product development teams determine product costs imparted to new products, much of the book details how these teams optimize product costs. The book also includes ways company leaders can create and sustain company-wide engagement in optimizing product costs and keeping the resulting increased profit margins. The reader is entertained while observing a three-day workshop where executives of a fictitious company, Defender Products, Inc. are being taught the C-O-S-T system by its developers. The story flows like a business workshop with slides, dialog, and break-out sessions. The content will benefit all companies that design, develop and manufacture products.