Cost Management: A Strategic Emphasis 5th Edition by David Stout, Edward Blocher, Gary Cokins

Exercise 52

Research Assignment, Strategy Obtain from your library a copy of following article: John H. Flemming, Curt Coffman, and James K. Harter, “Manage Your Human Sigma,” Harvard Business Review (July-August, 2005), pp. 107-114. The authors of this article state (p. 114): “Ask any CEO to list his or her most pressing business challenges, and you will no doubt hear concerns about customer and employee retention, authentic and sustainable growth, eroding margins, and cost efficiencies. . . . We are confident that measuring and managing two simple factors— employee and customer engagement—can lead to breakthrough improvements in all aspects of your business.”

Required After reading the above-referenced article, answer the following questions:

1. What is the general issue addressed by the authors of this article? That is, what managerial problem are they discussing?

---

2. How, conceptually, is the Human Sigma approach developed by the authors of this article similar to or distinct from Six Sigma?

---

3. How do the authors propose to measure the effectiveness of the employee-customer encounter? What evidence do they offer regarding the predictive value of the performance metric they are proposing?

---

4. According to the authors, what strategies can an organization use to improve the quality of the employee-customer encounter?

Step 1 of 5

Management and Control of Quality

Quality is explained as a term associated with customer satisfaction. It is the total level of satisfaction any customer gets from any organization’s products or service. There are two components of quality- Design Quality and Performance Quality. There are various approaches to setting quality related expectations and among those alternatives, Cost of Quality (COQ) Reporting, TQM, Lean System, and Six Sigma are the few.