BUSINESS PHILOSOPHIES BUSINESS VOCABULARY IN USE

 

BUSINESS VOCABULARY IN USE 18. BUSINESS PHILOSOPHIES

 

A Total quality management Tom Dryden, or Dryden Vacuum Cleaners, believes in quality: ‘The specifications or specs of a product are exact instructions about its design, including its dimensions (size), how it is to be made, the materials to be used, etc. the objective of quality control is conformity to specifications, the idea that the product should be made exactly as it was intended, with zero defects: no faults at all. B Continuous improvement Ray, at Lightning Technologies: ’We are always making small improvements or enhancements; this is continuous improvement. We refer to it by its Japanese name: kaizen.’ C Benchmarking Jim, production manager at an electricity power station in the UK: ‘We use a system called benchmarking to compare our performance to other power stations. We’ve recently been to the US to see how the best power stations operate-best practice- and try to copy it. We’ve managed to halve the number of workers, and increase productivity.’ D Business process re-engineering EXERCISES 18.1 Complete the crossword, using words from A opposite. Across: 3. See 6 down 4,5 down Right _______ _______. (5,4) Down: 1. What the designer decides. (13) 2. Doing it again when you shouldn’t have to. (9) 18.2 Which expression from B, C and D opposite describes each of these situations? One of the expressions is used twice. 1. A police service reduces the number of forms to fill in when a crime is reported, first from fifteen to twelve, then to ten, then to seven, then to three. 2. A travel company closes all its high street shops, lays off middle managers and half of its sales assistants and retrains the others to sell on the phone. It also starts an internet service.

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