Whether you’re new to the quality and continuous improvement arena or a seasoned expert seeking detailed information on a specific quality topic, you should find what you need in our Glossary of Terms.

Explore the concepts, tools, applications and technical terms that make up the world of continuous improvement.

Objective

An Objective is the result desired by an organisation or individual through effort. The effort is intended to attain or accomplish a Goal and is usually accompanied by instructions for how it can be attained or with an understanding for each persons assignment in a team effort to achieve the objective.

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One Factor at a Time (OFAT)

One Factor at a Time (OFAT) describes the popular but highly inefficient way to conduct an experiment where the process is evaluated from the change one thing, evaluate, change it back and change another and so on. It is deemed to be less effective than the Design of Experiments (DOE) approach because OFAT does not take into account how multiple factors interact with each other and therefore their potential to impact upon the process.

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One Piece Flow

One Piece Flow, single piece flow or continuous flow manufacturing are terms used to describe the technique used to manufacture components in a cellular environment. The principle is that no single unit of production can move to the next downstream section in the production cell until that person completes their process step. As a result this means that if necessary the entire process cell should wait until the downstream process is completed because the goals of one-piece flow are to make one part at a time, every time, and defect free.

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Operation

Operation defines a planned activity involving a process or series of acts especially of a practical or mechanical nature involved in a particular form of work.

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Operational Excellence (OE)

Operational Excellence (OE) is an integrated management approach that strives to achieve the maximum sustainable returns on its assets by implementing a broad range of processes and practices such as Lean Six Sigma. The use of an Operational Excellence approach benefits an organisation by creating an environment where the transfer of knowledge and capabilities results in improved business operations that are Better, Faster, Safer and which operate at Reduced Costs.

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Opportunity Cost

Opportunity Cost of a resource refers to the cost of passing up the next best choice when making a decision. For example, if an asset is used for one purpose, the opportunity cost is the value of the next best purpose the asset could have been used for. Opportunity cost analysis is an important part of a companys decision-making processes, but is not treated as an actual cost in any financial statement.

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Optimisation

Optimisation is the term used to describe adjusting the process inputs to produce the best possible average result or response with minimum variation.

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Orthogonal

Orthogonal describes the principle of how each factor is tested in such a way that it can be evaluated independently of the other factors.

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Outlier

An Outlier is an observation in the data set that is not part of and is far removed from the natural clustering of the rest of the data set. It is an unusually large or an unusually small value compared to the others being measured. If an outlier is a genuine result, it is important because it might indicate an extreme of behaviour of the process under study. For this reason, all outliers must be examined carefully before embarking on any formal analysis. Outliers should not routinely be removed without further justification.

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Output

Output is the term used to describe the product, service or task resulting from the completion of a process.

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Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)

Overall Equipment Effectiveness is a measure of equipment performance in terms of availability, downtime, performance, quality and throughput relative to design specifications, and the quality of its output. The result is expressed as a percentage and this percentage can be viewed as a snapshot of the current production efficiency for a production process or production unit.

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