The Rise of Sustainable Supply Chains

After the recession of 2008 companies got leaner and part of this new way of doing business involves looking at inefficiencies throughout the value chain as a way to leverage cost and enhance savings. Lean efforts have been demonstrated to yield substantial environmental benefits (pollution prevention, waste reduction and reuse opportunities) as well as leverage compliance issues.

Although sustainable supply chains have been steadily growing, in 2010 we saw an explosion of activity. The growth of greener supply chains in 2010 included a much greater focus on monitoring, measurement and verification from a host of companies including Wal-Mart, IBM, Proctor and Gamble, Kaiser Permanente, Puma, Ford, Intel, Pepsi, Kimberly-Clark,

Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Dell, AT&T, P&G, and Herman Miller.

In addition to private enterprise, government agencies in the US (General Services Administration) and abroad (DEFRA in Britain) have set green standards and guidelines for federal procurement.

Major value chain concerns such as materials water and waste management, are part of a growing sustainability trend where companies are increasingly concerned with their suppliers’ sustainability efforts.

Corporate social responsibility issues including addressing concerns for human rights, fair labor and sustainable development got a lot of attention from big companies like Nestle, Corporate Express, Danisco, Starbucks, Unilever and the apparel industry.

Read more text http://www.greenconduct.com

Effective Team Charter

Too often teams spend a considerable amount of their valuable resources trying to figure out what it is they are supposed to do, writes contributors John Moran, Grace Duffy and Michael Rudis. Before starting any type of a process improvement work, it is important to know where you’re headed. Here’s how a Team Charter can help.

A Team Charter is the official document from the team sponsor that empowers the team to act. It is a written document describing the mission of the team and how this mission is to be accomplished.

The Team Charter is one of the most under-used and under-valued tools available to sponsors, team leaders, and facilitators for helping a team succeed.But it is often overlooked because it is time consuming to develop. To write a clear, concise, and inclusive Team Charter requires great forethought and effort.

Often the sponsor is in such a rush to start the teaming process that they skip the basic step of filling out a Team Charter that clearly defines the goals and objectives to be achieved. When a team is started without a formal Team Charter many meetings are often wasted trying to figure “why we are here, what we should do, and when it should be done.” The team spends a considerable amount of time and energy trying to second guess what the sponsor really wanted when the team was formed. This is a loss of valuable time and talent that could be avoided by designing a clear mission statement prior to the team’s formation. That’s why a sponsor must take the time to fill out a Team Charter.

The Team Charter is an official work contract. This document delineates the strategic goals, boundaries, measures of success, constraints/limits, and available resources. The Team Charter provides a framework for ongoing discussions between the team and its sponsor with regard to the team’s direction and progress.

It is an iterative process until a base line acceptance is established. It must be reviewed on a regular basis by the sponsor, the team leader, facilitator, and team members to ensure that it is reflective of what the team is doing or will be doing in the future.

The following example of the use of a Team Charter in a Public Health Department is an excellent adaptation of the concepts in the original team charter article to provide a guidance document to beginning Process Action Teams.

Read more text http://www.processexcellencenetwork.com

Wall Builder is a web-based information security and confidentiality management software application that enables organizations to centrally control, monitor and report on user access

permissions across multiple applications, including document management, accounting, portal, CRM, time entry and records management systems. It also automates notifications to individuals subject to specific policies and tracks acknowledgments for compliance purposes.

This year, several law firms have been recognized for their success based on their adoption of IntApp Wall Builder. Most recently, Patricia Fitzpatrick, Director of Practice Management at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, a full-service law firm with over 600 lawyers, was honored by the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA.) as part of its 2011 Distinguished Peer Awards Program. She is one of three finalists in the “Risk and Records Management Champion” category. The winner will be announced August 25, 2011 at ILTA’s annual conference.

“We’re pleased to count ourselves as a successful IntApp Wall Builder client and honored to be selected as a finalist for an ILTA Distinguished Peer Award based on our information risk management efforts,” said Patricia Fitzpatrick, Director of Practice Management, Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP. “IntApp has definitely distinguished itself in our eyes, particularly with its service team’s commitment to addressing our rigorous product implementation and information security requirements.”

Wall Builder is the most-adopted ethical walls and confidentiality management software by law firms with 150 or more lawyers. According to an independent survey by the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) of its membership, 74% of large law firms using commercial software to enforce ethical screens to secure access to confidential information use IntApp Wall Builder.

Law firms must closely manage and track internal access to client information for many reasons. These include waiver-driven ethical screens, client outside counsel guidelines, and compliance with regulations such as the HITECH Act, ITAR and several data privacy laws.

Wall Builder replaces distributed, ad hoc approaches to information security with a centralized system that provides organizations with unprecedented capability and control over user access to specific applications, documents and other information. It’s the only product for law firms that delivers real-time enforcement while updating access rights in response to attorney behavior to ensure that policies are kept up to date automatically.

“Today law firms face an unprecedented set of confidentiality drivers, which is why so many choose to work with IntApp, as we focus on developing the most sophisticated technology available for addressing this specific challenge, and delivering it in a way that’s easy to deploy and easy to use,” said Pat Archbold, head of IntApp’s Risk Practice Group. “We’re excited to reach these important milestones and thankful to the legal community for standardizing on IntApp Wall Builder for confidentiality management.”

About IntApp

IntApp provides software products and services that enable law firms to achieve competitive advantage by exceeding client compliance requirements, increasing revenue, and reducing operational costs. IntApp’s three practice groups (Risk, Revenue and Integration) focus on understanding existing pressures and emerging trends, and translate this knowledge into products and best practices. IntApp products are the most-adopted in their respective categories – Wall Builder for ethical screens and client confidentiality management, Time Builder for time capture, and Integration Builder for application integration and master data management. IntApp serves over 200 customers, is endorsed by major software vendors across all categories, and has cultivated a vibrant partner community.

Read more text http://www.businesswire.com

Dunbar’s number takes this idea to the next level, possibly defining the maximum effective size of an organization. It needs to be said that this rests on the premise that stable social relationships are essential for effective organizations. These stable social relationships are based on social contact and mutual recognition. These in turn are limited by our cognitive capabilities. Dunbar’s number hypothesizes that there is an upper limit beyond which detailed rules are necessary to maintain stable social order. Based on observations of villages, armies, academic organizations, communities and companies, this number is proposed to be around 150 people. In the words of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar

“this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”

read at http://www.gembapantarei.com/

The Decade of Action, launched on 11 May 2011, seeks to prevent road traffic deaths and injuries which experts’

project will take the lives of 1.9 million people annually by 2020.

ISO has developed more than 800 standards for the automotive sector, including more than 200 related to the specific subject of road safety through its two technical committees: ISO/TC 22, Road vehicles and ISO/TC 204, Intelligent transport systems.

An eagerly awaited International Standard for road traffic safety management systems is currently being developed by ISO. The future ISO 39001, Road-traffic Safety management systems – Requirements with guidance for use, will make an immense impact on the development of traffic safety and diminish a major public health problem across the world. The standard will take the next step forward either in the form of a Draft International Standard (DIS) or as a fully published Technical Specification.

read at http://www.iso.org

Involving consumers – Why and how provides national standards bodies and other standards development organizations with practical guidance on achieving consumer participation in standardization.  It covers why and when to engage consumers, the added value of their participation, how to organize it effectively and what it means to be a consumer representative.

The brochure also describes ISO’s Committee on Consumer Policy (COPOLCO), funding and training of consumer representatives, and resources and links for further study. Twenty-four case studies show how these different issues have been addressed, especially in a national or regional context.

Some key points are:

• Standards are more market-relevant if they address consumer concerns, and if consumers are involved in their development

• Consumer preferences, societal issues, and trade agreements are driving an expansion of standards work programmes, which makes consumer involvement essential
• There are many positive ways that consumers can influence the standards dialogue
• Consumer representatives should be independent from commercial interests and able to communicate the viewpoint of the end-user consumer.  They should also be able to feed back their knowledge gained from standards experiences to other consumers.

• Consumers lack resources. They need financial and other support to participate in standards-setting, especially at the international level.
• Consumers need to be made aware of the importance of standards and standards participation, and could benefit from training in standards procedures and effective participation.

read at http://www.iso.org

However, the fact that this is the title of my Chair seemed to me to choose the subject of my inaugural lecture automatically.
It just had to be an introduction to Dr. Deming’s life and work—which is ambitious for just a short talk,
but I shall try.
Let us begin with the quotation which most of you will have seen in the publicity for this talk.

“Dr. W. Edwards Deming has a lot to answer for. He has been responsible for turning the writer’s life upside down.”

These two sentences were written by a Nottingham Trent University student in September 1998. They were the

opening words of the project which he wrote after attending my introductory course on Dr. Deming’s work. And in
his second paragraph he spoke of “many nights of frustrated reading related to Dr. Deming and his work.” So, be
warned: this could be damaging to your health!
To help you understand where I am coming from, and why, let me give you a …

BRIEF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In the late 1960′s I became the first full-time Statistics lecturer in the Mathematics Department just up the road at the
University of Nottingham. Before long there was an impressive and thriving Statistics Group there, headed in the
1980s by Professor Adrian Smith, well-known to some of you in the audience; I stayed full-time with the Group for
nearly 20 years.

read at http://www.spcpress.com

Results are often confused with better numbers. There are many ways to get better numbers. The easiest way is to simply change them. I once knew a plant comptroller who did this regularly to give upper management the numbers they wanted. It happens more often than we would care to admit.
Another way to get better numbers is to change the formula—the way the numbers arecomputed. Denominator management is an example. We can get much better numbers by changing the way we measure or compute the denominator in a ratio. The earlier example regarding DPMO
computation for circuit board quality level is an object lesson of this practice.

There are certainly other ways to get better numbers without changing anything substantially. These will only be limited by the ingenuity of creative people. But, they are false improvements. The only true improvement comes from improvements in the processes of production, and these must support efforts to optimize the entire enterprise, or they too will be false improvements.

read at http://www.spcpress.com

(Dr. Cheng is a research fellow in the ESRC Center for Research in Development, Instruction, and
Training at the University of Nottingham.) In the study,   semi-structured interviews  were conducted with managers and engineers who were responsible for SPC. Ten manufacturing companies, producing a wide variety of products and ranging in size  from 10 to 400+ employees, participated.

The main findings were:

• The machine operators in companies using SPC most effectively had generally
benefited from better levels of education or training (or both).

• In those companies, there was less involvement of engineering and managerial levels in the day-to-day use of SPC. Operators not only recorded and plotted data on control charts, but also interpreted the charts and often attempted the diagnosis and solution of problems.

• A variety of approaches to training was found, from traditional classroom courses to interactive computer and video systems. The effectiveness of both older and newer modes of teaching appeared limited. The difference in most of the successful SPC companies was that the training was generally augmented with supervised hands-on work on the shop floor.

• There were major education and training needs at all levels in most of the companies, from chart completion skills for operators, right through to basic conceptual knowledge about SPC at managerial levels. Henry Neave read and commented on a draft of this report, and in a number of
conversations with Dr. Cheng, interpreted the findings in a wider context than was possible in the study itself. The essence of Dr. Neave’s comments is reproduced in the dialogue which follows.

read at www.spcpress.com

The accident happened due to a concurrence of circumstances and an accumulation of human errors escalating to a disastrous 583 casualties.

A few of those circumstances and/or causes were:

* Stressors: fog and drizzle (limited sight of 1000 to 3000 feet), pilots were stressed out because both Boeing 747’s were (inconveniently) diverted to Tenerife instead of their original destination, Las Palmas. They couldn’t go there because of a bomb alarm, causing serious delays.
* Human error: due to the limited vision, the PanAm reaches the junction too late causing them to remain on the runway (too long).
* Technical problems: part of the lighting (center line) wasn’t ready yet and they were experiencing radio interference.
Authority: the KLM captain was (internationally) known for being ‘the exemplary pilot’ of KLM. He was a pilot and a flight instructor at the same time and KLM used him in advertising.

Read more here