Enabling Excellence: The Seven Elements Essential to Achieving Competitive Advantage

There is such a plethora of information out there on quality excellence that it can be quite overwhelming for the person who is just looking for simple, effective guidance. The great number of books, articles, and speeches describing a wide range of techniques, practices, and opinions actually adds more complexity and confusion than clarity. The aim of this book is to reduce and simplify into a vital few basic elements the foundation that will enable excellence and competitive advantage. It is also intended to provide guidance and reference for strategic and business planning to improve effectiveness, efficiency, and consumer loyalty.

Tim Pine, a former executive at Hasbro and a manager at Nike (among others), reduces the key to achieving sustainable quality excellence to just seven necessary elements. Those seven elements, each covered in separate chapters, are:
- Prevention: Eliminating opportunities for error
- Consumer focus: Building consumer loyalty
- Process capability: A successful mission depends on capable processes
- Process control: Maintaining balance and control with precise, timely adjustments
- Variation reduction: Zero variation means no tolerances are needed
- The Pareto principle: Isolating the vital from the trivial
- Breakthrough improvement: Innovation for superior product and market share

Each chapter has been constructed to concisely define each element and to focus on the key topics that describe each one. The idea is to provide a simple, clear, and concise roadmap to facilitate a complete comprehension of the foundation for excellence. Incorporate these seven elements into your strategic plan and culture and you will enable product excellence.

All of the concepts in this book are universal. They apply to all jobs in all industries.