Larry Webber – författare

So you’ve been asked to lead a quality control initiative? Or maybe you’ve been assigned to a quality team. Perhaps you’re a CEO whose main concern is to make your company faster, more efficient, and less expensive. Whatever your role is, quality control is a critical concept in every industry and profession. Quality Control For Dummies is the straightforward, easy guide to improving your company’s quality. It covers all of today’s available options and provides expert techniques for introducing quality methods to your company, collecting data, designing quality processes, and more. This hands-on guide gives you all the tools you’ll ever need to enhance your company’s quality, including: Understanding the importance of quality standardsPutting fundamental quality control methods to useListening to your customer about quality issuesWhipping quality control into shape with LeanWorking with value stream mappingFocusing on the 5S methodSupplement a process with KanbanFixing tough problems with Six SigmaUsing QFD to win customers overImproving you company with TOCThis invaluable reference is written from an unbiased viewpoint, giving you all the facts about each theory with no fuzzy coverings. It also includes steps for incorporating quality into a new product and Web sites packed with quality control tips and techniques. With Quality Control For Dummies, you’ll be able to speed up production, eliminate waste, and save money!

So you’ve been asked to lead a quality control initiative? Or maybe you’ve been assigned to a quality team. Perhaps you’re a CEO whose main concern is to make your company faster, more efficient, and less expensive. Whatever your role is, quality control is a critical concept in every industry and profession.

Quality Control For Dummies is the straightforward, easy guide to improving your company’s quality. It covers all of today’s available options and provides expert techniques for introducing quality methods to your company, collecting data, designing quality processes, and more. This hands-on guide gives you all the tools you’ll ever need to enhance your company’s quality, including:

Understanding the importance of quality standards Putting fundamental quality control methods to use Listening to your customer about quality issues Whipping quality control into shape with Lean Working with value stream mapping Focusing on the 5S method Supplement a process with Kanban Fixing tough problems with Six Sigma Using QFD to win customers over Improving you company with TOC

This invaluable reference is written from an unbiased viewpoint, giving you all the facts about each theory with no fuzzy coverings. It also includes steps for incorporating quality into a new product and Web sites packed with quality control tips and techniques. With Quality Control For Dummies, you’ll be able to speed up production, eliminate waste, and save money!

The intense midsummer sun beat down bright and hot. A long line of one hundred covered wagons stretched down the lonely, rural Midwest highway, slowly moving west. Every wagon is pulled by a pair of massive Belgium draft horses carrying one Amish family from Pennsylvania to new farmland in South Dakota. Twenty-five miles every day, six days per week.The wagons are shepherded west by a small team from by the US Department of Agriculture. Aaron Morgan, the team leader, is an aging Black Operations soldier recently released from three years in a veteran's hospital. After decades of fighting in many small conflicts around the world, he was physically and emotionally shattered. This journey is a test to see if he is well enough to function in a peaceful society.Many years ago, Aaron ran away from his family out of guilt from a terrible accident. He fell asleep with his infant son napping on his chest. When he awoke, he discovered that he had rolled onto his side and smothered the child. It was ruled an accident, but guilt drove him to sign everything over to his wife and toddler daughter and run away. He sought refuge by returning to the military and subjecting himself to punishing physical exercise until he became the perfectly fit soldier.After completing every difficult Army infantry school, Aaron was recruited by a government agency to support its off-the-record activities. Now following many years fighting in the deserts and jungles of the world, he is too old and used up for that life. They do not need him anymore. It is time he retired.His former commander's hobby is rehabilitating his old comrades. He finds them a government project to slowly assimilate into the civilian world. This is Aaron's one chance to remain free of the hospital. His doctors doubt that he is ready and expect him to go rogue, creating a bloody mess. His every move is monitored by the hospital for signs of uncontrollable anger or mental instability.Unknown to him, his assistant is Alice, the daughter he abandoned when she was 2 years old. Recruited in the hopes that she would help ease him back into the civilized world, she struggles to understand the father she never knew. The father whose absence threw her and her mother into a life of poverty. The father whose absence drove her mother to suicide as soon as Alice left for college.The story is about their slow journey west. Every day Aaron walks with the wagons always ready to resolve problems as they arise. Some people think the Amish are an easy target. Protesters delay them, horse thieves steal their animals, and a corrupt government contracting manager cheats them for the basic services they paid him for. Along the route they meet with the Ohio and Indiana Amish communities to exchange families.Aaron's location was accidentally revealed by a well-meaning news report. Now a Cuban Army Colonel is on his trail to repay a debt of honor. He has vowed to kill Aaron's family members due to Aaron's involvement in the death of his young wife. He is patiently waiting for the right moment.The leader of the Amish people struggles to keep control of the situation. His patience is tried by Amish teenagers and his niece's affection for a non-Amish policeman. His religion says he must resolve issues without confrontation, but the English (non-Amish) use this against him.Aaron eventually discovers the hidden identity of his assistant. When he tries to open the conversation her many years of anger, disappointment and sadness caused by her father's absence pour out. How can she overcome her deep-seated anger at this stranger? Since her mother's death, he is her only close family.Can Aaron complete his mission to escort the wagons to South Dakota before the hospital decides he is dangerous and needs to be permanently locked up in the hospital? Can he overcome his daughter's animosity to rebuild his shattered family?

In the midst of the Washington DC government district, sits the Cafe Burma, run by a 40-ish man and his 18-year-old daughter, Dewi. Dewi grew up as an American teenager but was also schooled in traditional Burmese values of maintaining the family's honor and obedience to your elders. She yearns to escape the long hours working in the family business to learn a trade at college and raise a family of her own in America. Her boyfriend is reluctant to leave the old neighborhood, yet if she stays, she will never break free from the cafe.Her father has quite different plans and he is becoming desperate. Without a son to inherit his property, all of it will pass to his brother. He has devised a plan to keep his money from his brother. Dewi must become his son through a sex change operation. She is now legal age to leave home, so he must act quickly to force this drastic surgery onto her as a 'family duty'.One day a famous Hollywood actor stops by for lunch. After talking to Dewi he eventually offers to talk to her about a potential part in his new movie filming in the area. Her boyfriend is angry because the discussion will take place at the actor's hotel. The violent argument rips the couple apart. Both regret the split. Whenever things start to work out between them some new events keep reopening old wounds.The Cafe Burma itself is not what it first seems to be. Hiring, training and supporting an intelligence network is expensive. Smaller countries cannot afford to do that, so they establish a spy team in plain sight. Ethnic cafes are the perfect cover. They are located near government offices in the hopes of someone revealing some secret over an informal lunch. Any profits finance their spy operations.Many things happen in DC that impact all the other countries of the world. They could be economic, diplomatic, military, legal, financial aid, tariffs, the entire gauntlet of areas and topics. Often a decision or political action impacting a small country is never mentioned by the news media. These countries must ferret out what information they can. Their small embassy staffs deal with official Washington bureaucrats. They rely on their local spy nets to gather relevant information.Each café was originally financed and staffed by their home country. The wealthier ones have more sophisticated listening and surveillance devices. The poorer ones manage with much less. Most of the managers have been here for years. To keep their dream job, they must feed a steady stream of intelligence tidbits back to their country. They can be replaced at any time. The managers are careful not to do anything that would cause them to be expelled or to be recalled home. With its crime and chaos, they find downtown D.C. a better place to live than their home countries.A pair of FBI agents monitor the spies in the ethnic cafes like a protective uncle. Better the spy you know than the one you don't.Life in the cafe is never easy. Lately a new set of Chinese secret agents have been trying to force all of the small ethnic cafes into working for them, or else face ruin. A new corrupt health inspector is trying to extract bribes from the cafes. The local criminal gang is threatening violence for interference in their activities.What will happen next at the Cafe Burma?