The results of our R&D efforts are put into the public domain through publications and presentations.

The following topics are currently the focus of our R&D efforts:

Will, ideas, and execution are the outcomes of a strong leadership process. What are the elements of that process?

• Does quality improvement pay?
• Is there a long-term alternative to quality improvement that will provide better business results?

If clear, understandable, and supportable arguments supported an answer of "yes" to the first question and "no" to the second question, modern approaches to improving quality and value would be spreading at a faster rate among companies, industries, and countries.

Recently, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), formerly the Bureau of Standards, released an important report. This report concluded that the stock of the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award Winners from 1988 – 1997 produced 2.5 times the return on investment as did the S&P 500, a measure of overall performance of the US stock market. If leaders of publicly held companies believed this report, why would they not use the award criteria as a guide for running their company and apply for the award. If business school professors believed the report, why would they not make the award criteria an integral part of the curriculum?

Click each item to see the types of questions addressed in this effort:

• Setting the context
• Methods
• Leadership

Rudy Crew, Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, New York Times Magazine (August 31, 1997)

Slight adaptation of the quote from Rudy Crew would describe the challenge facing executives in any industry or government organization trying to lead improvement. Incredible levels of improvement are available to the organization that can close the gap between what is being achieved somewhere in the industry, or at a few of its locations, but not in the others. The aim of this project is to identify existing methods and develop new methods to accelerate the spread of good ideas throughout an organization.

This approach applies:

• To organizations with multiple, similar sites, for example, a global manufacturer or a national service provider
• Within a sector of the economy that has multiple sites that do not usually compete directly with each other, for example, education

• What are we trying to accomplish?
• How will we know that a change is an improvement?
• What changes can we make that will result in improvement?

It is easy to see how these questions could be used to guide an improvement effort of small scale. However, the approach to answering the questions needs to be enhanced when the system under study is large or complex.

The aim of this effort is to build on the methods such as Quality Function Deployment and Re-engineering and to develop an effective approach to designing or redesigning large or complex systems.

The aim of this project is to review and classify the current methods of scheduling and develop a coherent approach to scheduling that optimizes the use of resources, reduces delays, and applies to many settings. The existing approaches to scheduling are being classified into four categories (based on the ideas of James Meteer of the Sigma-Aldrich Corporation):

• Whether the frequency of events (such as a shipment to a subsidiary or visit to the doctor) is fixed or variable
• Whether the amount of product or service that is produced is fixed or variable

The familiar economic order point and quantity is an example of a variable frequency/ fixed quantity approach to scheduling. As the project has progressed, it is becoming apparent that an effective scheduling approach will be a combination of all four of these types.

The aim of this project is to extend the system of experimentation to more complex situations and to applications in the service industries.