Articles and Publications

This collection of educational publications comes from Secora team members. Each article qualifies specific aspects and applications of the Secora methodology.  We hope they might inspire you to think about new ways of applying process optimisation in your enterprise.


Essential Elements of a Good Project Charter

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Sean Rast writes for iSixSigma magazine about the project charter. This article breaks the project charter into it's key components and offers tips for documenting project parameters effectively.

Averages Should Be Thrown Out The Window

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Should you change your supplier based on average quality scores? Is one sales person better than the other based on averages? Should capital investments be made based on averages? Our tendency to oversimplify statistical analysis often amounts to sweeping critical business problems under the rug.

Continuous Improvement in the Service Sector

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Continuous improvement process (CIP) programs have traditionally been employed for quality improvement in manufacturing industries. Today service firms and service functions within almost every sector, are also using some sort of continuous improvement methods to boost performance. This paper presents guidelines for the application of CIP programs to service functions.

Preventative Business Care (PBC) - Part 1 of 3

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To stay competitive in a fast moving market, companies must work to increase customer satisfaction, gain market share, and at the same time remain profitable. Many enterprises are focusing their efforts in one area hoping that the other two will automatically follow. To survive in today’s market we have to address each of these metrics separately.

What Makes a Good Project Charter?

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The main output of the define phase within the DMAIC methodology is the project charter. Without having a completed project charter starting the measure phase makes little sense. Even so the DMAIC methodology gives us our project path, the project charter is responsible for where the path is to lead us.

Case Study - Logistics

Secora was engaged by a major logistics organisation to review and optimize the business processes surrounding the management of third party contractors within its IT Department.
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Essential Elements of a Good Project Charter

Sean Rast writes for iSixSigma magazine about the project charter. This article breaks the project charter into it's key components and offers tips for documenting project parameters effectively.
Download (4.9MB)

Case Study - Laser Welding (Automotive)

A Tier 1 European automotive supplier had major issues on a newly launched product: Failure to meet customer volume requirements; Failure to meet customer quality requirements; Massive cost overrun. Using the SLIM (Lean) Methodology Secora helped the client to solve its most prominent operational effectiveness issues and reduce internal manufacturing cost to below the original target costing, without capital investment or design change.
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