Harrington Institute Key Publications

The importance of product and process benchmarking was highlighted back in the late 1980s when Xerox credited benchmarking as one of the most important factors responsible for successfully winning the Malcolm Baldrige Award. Since that time benchmarking has become a key part of the criteria for all of the state, national, and international excellence awards. There is just no reason to take a chance on making an improvement change when someone else already has worked all of the bugs out of the process. At a very minimum ...

Business plans! Long-range plans! Operating plans! Development plans! Marketing plans! Financial plans! Strategic plans. Are we confused yet? No wonder many organizations do not plan well, do not like to plan or do not use the plans they have. But we do no know that with proper planning , we can put ourselves in the clearest and best possible position to compete in the ever-increasingly complex world of business (and to take advantage of a few moments of good fortune). We also know that success is not created by using an excessively cumbersome planning language and arguing over the semantics of planning, but by the competitive focus it provides to everyone in the organization. This critical alignment ...

Change, change, change – we are all for change. We want to see him change, her change, them change. We want to see the organization change. We want to see everyone else change. Yes, we are all for change as long as we don’t have to change, but it is a fact of life; we all are changing everyday. Our environment is changing, our culture is changing, and the way we work is changing. We have three options ...

Internal Benchmarking (sometimes called Process Compatibility) is a system where the different locations within an organization that do or produce similar products compare how they are producing the similar outputs. The purpose of this activity is ...

Good is no longer good enough. To survive in today’s competitive environment, you need to excel. To excel, an organization needs to focus on all parts of the organization, optimizing the use and effectiveness of all of its resources. After years of working with all types of organizations using many different approaches to improve performance, we have come to realize that there are only five things that need to be managed in order for an organization to excel. We call these five key elements “The Five Pillars of Organizational Excellence.” All five must be managed simultaneously. Top management’s job is to keep all of them moving ahead at the same time. To concentrate on one or two of them and let the others slide is a surefire formula for failure. The world is different today than it was yesterday and ...

The Lean methods were designed to minimize waste, maximize value, and reduce complexity and variation throughout an organization and its supply chain. The father of the Lean concepts was Henry Ford Senior. Toyota further developed and popularized Lean Management Systems. Toyota’s production system effectively utilized Lean techniques to drastically improve its organization’s performance. These techniques have proven to be effective in all types of organizations including distribution, manufacturing, transportation and the service industries. Lean Six Sigma ...

Capacity building in developing nations has now become a central feature in international development strategies. It is widely acknowledged that weak institutional and governance capacity in poor countries is an obstacle to improving the living standards of people in these countries. That is why donors as well as development financing institutions have ...

All organizations, big and small, advanced and start-up, public and private, service and manufacturing - follow a set of processes that they have defined. These processes often are not documented and in many cases are not universally followed. Even when they are documented, the rapid changing business environment makes them obsolete within two or three years. Most organizations define their operating procedures when they are founded, but rarely change them except when they fail and then a quick patch is put in place to solve the immediate problem. This often causes them to be highly bureaucratic, out of data, overly complicated, not used, costly, time consuming and Irritating. To survive today, ...

According to Forrester Research, online business-to-business transactions are expected to reach $327 billion a year by the end of 2002. Most organizations know about the web and have taken steps to be part of the E-business marketplace, but at what price and to what degree are they being successful? Organizations must not only survive E-business initiatives, but they must also benefit from substantial cost savings and improved lines of business/market-share. To accomplish this, ...

In today’s fast-moving, service- oriented environment the value of most organizations is three to ten times greater for their knowledge assets compared to their capital assets. Basic economic theory tells us that most assets are subject to diminishing returns. For example, when you sell one of three apples, you lose the apple. But that is not true of your knowledge management assets. With knowledge, the more you use it, the more valuable it becomes. With knowledge, you can sell it over and over again. This phenomenon is called The Law of Increased Returns. With such a large percentage ...

Excellent engineers, accountants, sales personnel, and technicians often are promoted to managers based upon their technical skills. The organization fails to realize that what we are asking the individual to do is to learn a whole new set of skills that he/she has not been practicing. When an individual accepts an assignment as a manager, they have made a major career change. Individuals that used to get job ...

Everything is changing around the world in a pace that blurs everyone’s vision. The good old days were last Friday and but now it is Monday and the rules have changed. Yesterday’s competitors are today’s partners. What was out of the question yesterday is practical today and obsolete tomorrow. If you feel comfortable with your business plan, you have probably taken too long to develop it. In many organizations by the time you have obtained all the approvals necessary to buy a computer, that computer is obsolete. Structures need to be fluid, allowing organizations to flow around obstacles evolving them and moving on as though they were not even there. We are evolving from organizations that depended upon capital to drive their success to organizations whose success is primarily dependent upon their knowledge. In this environment ...

Notwithstanding that "battles are often lost for want of ammunition", a company’s portfolio of projects rarely succeed or fail for minor or trivial reasons. The causes are usually substantial and are often self-evident, if the organization is properly prepared. Some of the issues that lead to poor portfolio management are ...

Customer’s expectations related to products and services have continued to increase. As soon as an organization “wows” the customer with a better product and/or service, it becomes the standard and the customers begin to look for organizations that perform at a higher quality level. In WWII acceptable defect levels of 1, 2 or even 5% was the norm. When we bought a car, we planned on coming back with a long list of things that needed to be corrected. Then, the Japanese auto industry showed us that better autos could be produced in large quantities. They also showed us that televisions, radios, steel, and many other products could be produced at high quality levels without increasing cost. America reacted with a ...

There are many improvement methodologies that are presented to management. The human resource professionals have a methodology that is called Total Resource Management (TRM) that is focused on getting the very best from your human capital. The industrial engineers talk about Total Productivity Management (TPM). This methodology is designed to optimize the use of the organization’s resources to provide the maximum output. Your controller talks about Total Cost Management (TCM) that focuses on reducing costs by activities, like Activity-Based Costing. The quality professional sells Total Quality Management (TQM), believing that by providing the highest quality output the first time, the organization will save all of their rework costs and increase their market share because the organization will have happy customers. And, of course, the engineering and Information Technology side of the business talks about Total Technology Management (TTM) as a way to win your customers’ hearts. These methodologies all ...

A critical component of an integrated Total Quality System (TQSM) methodology is a structured and disciplined process for managing and implementing change. The adoption of a TIM philosophy will create a great deal of organizational change that will have a major impact on organizational members’ current beliefs, behaviors, knowledge, and expectations. To make this challenge even more daunting, the changes brought about when a TQMS is upgraded will impact people who are probably already overwhelmed with the increasing acceleration of change in their professional and personal lives. Therefore, all organizational members must realize that organizational change can and must be managed. Change cannot be viewed as a one time event or a passing phase. Change must be seen as ...

As an executive in a mature company, you probably need to respond to new competitors, consolidations, mergers and acquisitions, global expansion, and e-commerce. If you are leading a start-up, you may be struggling with building an infrastructure that will support rapid growth while trying to avoid unnecessary bureaucracy. On top of this, you may also be faced with higher than desired turnover and a shortage of talent to draw upon in the employment marketplace. As a leader ...

Our quality practice is led by consultants who have managed and implemented successful TQM processes in many different organizations. We recognize that there is no one right process for all organizations, but that an effective TQM approach needs to be designed to meet an organization’s specific needs and build on its strengths and accomplishments. To assist organizations in developing the right approach, we use a four-phase Implementation Framework. ...

There is a big difference between origination, creativity and innovation.
• Origination is the process of creating something new – something that didn’t exist before.
• Creativity is the process of generating something new that has value. Creativity is idea generation.
• Innovation is the process of creating something new of value that has useful application and significant impact upon an individual, a group an organization, an industry, or a society. Innovation is how an organization or an individual makes money from creativity.
Four out of five patents ...

Process Qualification (sometimes called “Product Qualification”) is a system used to evaluate the adequacy of the product design and to determine if the product design can be manufactured at the projected cost and quality. Then the next step is ...

The Process Redesign methodology was developed by H. James Harrington in the early 1980’s and is applied to the current process to remove all of its waste and to streamline its activities. It first streamlines the processes, and then uses ...

In the 1950s, Armand V. Feigenbaum defined Total Quality Control in his book of the same name. Feigenbaum’s book defined quality’s relationship to the total product chain. In the mid-1980s, total quality management became the preferred phrase. It came into being without definition, and as a result, it represented a very free wheeling approach in comparison to the engineering-defined approach in total quality control. Consultants and professionals in all disciplines claim ...

During the period 1987 – 1991 Dr. H. James Harrington developed the methodology to prepare a Strategic Improvement Plan (SIP). In the mid 1980s Harrington realized that most organizations had a hit or miss approach to their selection of improvement programs. Organizations were more influenced by ...

Strategic Planning has become both a manager’s dream and nightmare. Virtually every type of organization in each and every industry around the world puts strategic planning, alignment and accelerating results high on its improvement agenda. Yet, what is it about most organizations and its leaders that cause them to have such a hard time getting alignment behind their vision, mission, and strategic goals resulting in getting rid of the employees they want to keep and keeping the ones they want to get rid of? This stifles the creativity and innovation that they seek to foster. In short, what makes some companies successful in the new economy while others still continue to struggle to get it right? According to Research ThinkTank, e-business Strategies’ visionary companies understand that current business models and organizational design are insufficient to meet the challenges of doing business in the new millennium. Enter the Organization’s Master Plan (OMP) methodology ...

Governments around the world are being pressured to improve quality of their services while reducing percent Gross National Product they consume. complexity today’s environment has made it necessary evaluate all alternatives before committing scarce resources one improvement effort. This report combines quality improvement efforts with the other major improvement efforts to gain maximum results. ...

Total Quality Management (TQM) consists of the most comprehensive and complete approach to performance improvement yet developed. It is the evolutionary result of all the improvement developments that have occurred over the past 200 years. It includes all of the continuous improvement approaches and the breakthrough approaches. The only improvement tools that weren’t included are the new product design approaches, with the exception of concurrent engineering, reliability concepts, and designing product based upon understanding the end customer’s needs and expectations. The TQM approaches ...