A heavy manufacturing organization commonly used Total Quality Manufacturing (TQM) and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) techniques. They had some small Continuous Improvement (CI) Teams that engaged in solving the front line day-to-day difficulties which commonly occur in operations of organizations worldwide.
Earlier in my career, I was fortunate enough to have worked for a few organizational giants like NASA, TRW, and United Airlines. Within these organizations, I was exposed to the rigors of systems thinking, Total Quality Management (TQM), and the Baldrige Award efforts of the 1990s.
