Communities of practice in quality improvement initiatives

Abstract

The field of Operations Management OM has evolved over time from being called Factory Management in the Post Industrial Evolution era to Production Management post world war and recently as OM 1970s onwards Sprague 2007 One of the important dimensions of OM has been the focus on Quality Over the years many quality philosophies like Quality Control Design of Experiments Total Quality Control Total Quality Management Six Sigma Toyota Production System Business Process Reengineering were propounded One such concept that emerged in the quality stream is Lean Manufacturing LM The origin of Lean concept was from Japan in the aftermath of Second World War when Japanese manufacturers were faced with massive resource constraint to rebuild their facilities newline newline