Strategy
A set of actions to position your company within its competitive environment. Assess your value proposition, identify activities to sustain your competitive advantage, and implement a strategy map for your firm. Along with you, we will develop a systematic approach to fit all actions with each other, properly positioning your company ahead of the competition. Utilize the SWOT analysis as a complement to the strategy map.

Metrics
Set of measures derived from your activities and specific to your organization. Develop a method to identify relevant Key Performance Indicators, and align these with the guiding strategy of the firm. Implement TAU, a metric to assess performance of critical assets (TAU – Total Asset Utilization).

Data
We refer to the methods for collecting data from the organization and its environment. Select relevant data to gain knowledge on the overall operation. You can only know what you measure. Make the best use of your database and IT systems, or even plan for before acquiring them.

Statistics
We offer business and industrial techniques to analyze the data, based on Six Sigma tools. These are some of the methods that can be applied in areas of opportunity: SPC statistical process control, DOE design of experiments, Gage Capability or Gage R&R, and Monte Carlo Simulation for a computer model of a process.

Applications: process control; process simulation; instrument repeatability (Gage R&R); reliability of parts, components, processes and systems. Also applicable for business improvements in finance, sales, customer interaction, and internal service processes. These tools apply wherever you have a repetitive set of actions, whether on the production area or in the financial and sales departments, as well as in several service industries.

Quality Systems
We can support your organization in each and all of the following quality systems. They are listed in growing order of importance, almost as they have evolved. In fact, they all have in common a systematic approach to the operation of an organization, and they all strive for continual improvement.

• ISO-9000 – an international standard to facilitate international trade. Its most recent version points in the direction of the systems below.

• TQM – Total Quality Management, a recognition that quality is not measured but created at every stage in the overall operation

• QMS – Quality Management System, an evolution of TQM, incorporating additional tools

• Six Sigma (6s) – these methods make use of traditional and advanced statistical tools, applied to processes whether in a manufacturing or in a business environment.

• DFSS – Design for Six Sigma takes a proactive approach in setting up the specifications of a product during the design phase, foreseeing variations in the production stage; see QFD

• QFD – Quality Function Deployment is a systematic approach to the design of products and services; includes DFSS

• Balanced Scorecard – the BSC brings measurement techniques developed more specifically to the business environment, recognizing the traditional lagging indicators (e.g. financial) and emphasizing leading indicators (e.g. customer response), within an integral view of the company.

• Baldrige National Quality Program – the Baldrige Award is the most prestigious recognition by the US federal government of highly successful companies and other organizations. This program recognizes seven steps very much in line with all of the above systems.

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