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Chapter 15 Productivity through Management

1. Canada’s Awards for Excellence (CAE Awards) is the Canadian equivalent of the Baldrige National Quality Award in the U.S. Launched in 1984, the CAE Awards is a national quality award program in Canada to help improve quality and productivity. This award stimulates Canadian companies to improve quality and productivity, recognizes the achievements of outstanding companies, provides an example to other organizations, establishes guidelines and criteria that can be widely used, and makes available to other organizations detailed information on how winning organizations were able to achieve outstanding quality. Go to http://www.nqi.ca/caeawards/ and find information to help you answer the following questions:

• In what three areas does the CAE Awards provide Criteria for Performance Excellence?
• How do the CAE Awards differ from ISO 9000?
• Name the most recent recipients of the CAE Awards.

2. Six Sigma.
As you learned from the chapter, Motorola and GE are highly committed Six Sigma companies. Visit GE’s Six Sigma site at http://www.ge.com/sixsigma/ and Motorola’s Six Sigma site at http://www.motorola.com/motorolauniversity.jsp and write a three-paragraph report on further insights you gained about Six Sigma after visiting these Web sites.

3. Balanced Scorecard
Go to the site:
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4938.html
Read the article on Balanced Scorecard by Harvard Professor Robert S. Kaplan
In groups of 2 or 3 students discuss:
What are the two variables found in time driven ABC (Activity Based Costing)?
What are the implications of the idea that “15 percent to 20 percent of the customers generate 100 percent (or more) of the profits”? Can you brainstorm on how this important customer group could be identified? How could the customer loyalty of this group be maintained?