MGT 610 – Operations Management – Week 5

Week 5 – Quality Management and Lean Systems

Our final week and I found myself taking off Friday just to get everything submitted on time. We talk about another favorite of mine and that is quality. I like the idea of quality, of incrementally improving step by step towards the unattainable. There is hope in this approach. This week we started off with the titans of quality, Deming and Juran. It is impossible to lead any quality conversation without the two. We looked at Lean, which I do not hear much about anymore. Some of the other concepts in the course explained the focuses of quality when I worked in management and the inability of the hospital system I worked for to implement quality within their nursing ranks (not the concept of quality, just the various practices of quality). We also read “Managing Quality” by Bohn and worked through Total Quality Management (TQM) concepts. Finally, it would be impossible to have any conversation about quality without deep diving Toyota, which we did in a reading by Womack where we looked at push versus pull and the five steps for rooting out waste.

The paper I wrote was on Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, an interesting topic, and how they instituted a culture of quality. I only worked in healthcare for two years but I learned a lot there, probably enough that I should have stayed in the field and made a career out of it. Overall, the class went well. I kept my streak of As going strong and I am looking forward to having two weekends without any classwork due.