ACE

Active Daily Use

Demonstration that use of ACE tools is part of the everyday running of your business.

Action Plan

Detailed listing of activities (including steps, owner/responsible party, deadline/timeframe, and status) that are required to achieve the desired objectives.

Targeted Turnback Reduction

Identifaction of major turnback categories and demonstrating through the use of RRCA that action put in place to fix those turnback categories have resulted in those categories of turnbacks being significantly reduced or eliminated.

Metrics

Indicators that are measured in order to assess performance. Used to quantify product performance, process performance, or progress toward meeting business goals.

Continuous Improvement

Involves small improvements in work processes as a result of ongoing improvement efforts by everyone. In time, these small improvements add up to a large improvement: the systematic and continuous elimination of waste of capital, materials, and people's time. Continuous improvement is accomplished by identifying and solving problems and by ongoing reduction of variation.

Market Feedback Analysis (MFA)

MFA is a means to capture and analyze the voice of the customer, regarding their satisfaction with a specific topic, issue, process or deliverable or the overall performance of an organization. Market feedback is collected through objective market data, customer satisfaction surveys, interviews, routine interactions and is rated on a standard 1-7 scale in the categories of Quality, Delivery, Relationship, Responsiveness, and Overall.

Quality Clinic Process Charts (QCPC)

QCPC is a simple tool for recording, over time, the number of turnbacks or escapes that occur in each step of a process. Pareto Charts are used in the QCPC process to chart turnback data in order to quickly recognize those problems that occur frequently.

Roadmap

Roadmap is a one-page tool which communicates each organization's major goals, strategies, and objectives for a one year (and often five year) horizon to a broad audience within the company. Its purpose is to help all organizations and employees to stay focused on the 'big picture' and to align their individual activities and objectives to accomplish common goals.

Cell

A Manufacturing department, business process department, or other workgroup. Typically, multiple cells work together to produce the final product or service delivered by a site.

Escape (Significant)

A Significant Escape is anything of major impact that does not conform to a customer's requirements. Examples of Significant Escapes include but are not limited to the following: Safety issues, major disruption to the customer, etc. Note, degrees of impact are defined by the customer.

Turnbacks

A Turnback is any situation that hinders the flow of work. Turnbacks include: tool problem, incorrect paperwork, and delays due to bottlenecks. Analysis of turnbacks is completed using the QCPC tool.

Benchmarking

A continuous, focused process of measuring and comparing our products/services/practices against industry leaders to assist the corporation in becoming World Class. Benchmarking enables changes that can lead to quantum improvements in products, processes, and services. It represents what our customers expect, or are likely to expect from our organization, products, and services.

Process Robustness

A method of achieving process reliability for business processes.

Team Leader

A person trained in identifying, analyzing, and solving chronic system problems and identifying improvement opportunities. Also discusses schedule requirements and expectations with team members, provides work area for the team, ensures adequate workflow in the area to facilitateprocess flow analysis, and makes sure front line supervision is kept informed.

External Customers

A person, workgroup, or organization to whom UTC provides a product or service.

Internal Customers

A person, workgroup, or organization within UTC to whom you provide a product or service.

Key Process

A process deemed to be high impact by customers and/or historical information within an organization. Key processes are usually identified for process robustness.

Process

A series of activities that takes an input, adds value to it, and produces an output and is definable, predictable, and repeatable. Operation(s) bound by inventory (or bound by areas where inventory could accumulate). If 1 operation has inventory, or the possibility of inventory, before and after it, it is a process. If 2+ operations have inventory, or the possibility of inventory before and after the last operation, they are a process.

Gold Target

A target, goal, or objective validated to be Best in Class

Cause and Effect (Fishbone) Diagram

A technique to graphically identify and organize many possible causes of a problem (effect). Used in Relentless Root Cause Analysis to assign potential reasons for a problem to related areas. Also refered to as a Fishbone Diagram or Ishikawa Diagram.

Value Stream Mapping

A value stream is a group of process that delivers valuse to its customers. Valuse Steam Mapping is a technique for depicting the value stream graphically. This bird's eye view of the valuse stream enables employees to identify waste and inefficiencies.

Value Stream Map (VSM)

A visual representation of every process in the material and information flow of the Value Stream.

Qualifying

ACE Certification level for a cell, site, or value stream that is characterized as "Baselining". This is the first certification level granted after a cell, site, or value stream officially starts its ACE journey and receives basic training in all of the ACE tools, and baselines its current performance.

Bronze

An ACE Certicication level for a cell, site, or value stream that is characterized as "Improved Performance" over Baseline or ACE Qualifying level. At bronze, cells, sites, or value streams show measureable improvement in key customer deliverables. Business results are positively impacted and significant business performance targets are set for Silver. All results are achieved through the use of ACE operating system tools.

Business Process

An ACE site type designation for organizations that are not classified as Manufacturing/Operations or Engineering. Includes functional groups like Finance, Legal, Human Resources, and Sales and Distribution, as well as Field and services organizations.

Certification Plan

An Action Plan specifically targeted towards establishing control and capacity of a process.

Impact Maturity Chart

An Impact Maturity Chart is a visual representation to assist an organization in prioritizing what processes to work on first. The maturity of the process is based on data, while the impact is determined by the effect of the process on the customer, employee, and business requirements.

ACE Board

An organization's performance tracking mechanism. It can be physical or electronic. ACE boards typically show all elements of the balanced scorecard as well as ACE tool usage and project status.

Value Stream

An organized group of processes that work together to provide value to customers. Value Stream Mapping may be applied to cell, site, and Value Stream levels.

Customer

Anyone who is affected by the product/service or by the process used to produce product/service. Customers are both internal and external.

Escape

Anything that does not confirm to your internal or external customer's requirement, but leaves your site/cell or department is considered an escape.

5 Why's Analysis

Asking "why" a problem occurred as many times as needed to get beyond the symptoms of a problem to uncover the root cause. There is typically more than one root cause to a problem.

Best in Class

Benchmarking has shown the site's processes are characterized by outstanding effiectiveness (Quality of output; cost), efficiency (Lead-Time, On-Time Delivery; Absence of Waste and Targeted Turnbacks; Standardization; Inventory Turns), and agility (Flexibility and Responsiveness). Best In Class organizations' performance, products, and/or services are recognized (i.e. customer nad independent 3rd party recognition) to be among the best.

Kaizen (Continuous Improvement)

Continuous Improvement is striving for perfection by continually removing successive layers of Waste, as they are discovered. It is generally accepted that a complete transformation process from mass production to Lean Manufacturing takes years . Perfection is zero waste and progress can't be benchmarked against competitors' levels of waste, but requires striving for world-class performance.

Standard Work (SW)

Standard Work is the method by which work is simplified and structured to ensure maximum quality, productivity , and repeatability over time.

Passport Policy

The Passport Policy should articulate when it is required to use the Passport Process. The policy is typically signed by the senior leader of an organization and specifies the level of program that must be under passport control, as well as the appropriate senior management officials to serve as members of the passport review board.

Gold

The highest ACE Certification level for a Cell, Site, or Value Stream that is characterized by "Best in Class" customer satisfaction and business performance.

5S (Visual Workplace)

The implementation of 5S promotes a visual and efficient workplace as well as a "welcoming" environment to both associates and visitors. The workplace should be self-explanatory, organized, controlled, improved, clean, safe, and welcoming. The 5S's are Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain.

Root Cause

The most basic underlying reasons for an event or condition. The root cause is where action must be taken to prevent recurrence.

Bottleneck

The operation within a process that limits the output of the whole process. Evidenced as where the parts "back up" behond a particular process, hence the nomenclature "bottleneck".

Passport

The passport review process is used to improve the decision-making capabilities of an organization for strategic activities. Typically these activities involve large-scale transformations or programs, such as a new platform, product, program deployment, a business merger or acquisition, a new or upgraded information system, a major new business opportunity between two or more divisions, the movement or outsourcing of work from one organization to another. The Passport tool incorporates a large number of good practices to strengthen the ingredients of effective and efficient decision making: 1. Decision Timelines 2. Decision Completeness 3. Decision Appropriateness 4. Decision Quality 5. Decision Action Ability 6. Decision Efficiency

Relentless Root Cause Analysis (RRCA)

The rapid , persistent pursuit of a fundamental process breakdown or failure. The root cause must be controllable, and not an act of nature.

Value-Added Work

Work that the customer is willing to pay for. A transformation of the shape or function of the material/information in a way that the customer will pay for.

Mistake Proofing

Developing methods and devices that help perform a task without defects, all the time.

Customer Defined

Metrics or performance criteria/expectations identified by a customer to a supplier.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)

Total Productive Maintenance is a method to achieve maximum, life-cycle equipment effectiveness through employee involvement. It includes subsets of: 1. Autonomous maintenance, 2. preventive maintenance, 3. predictive maintenance. One main goal of TPM is to ensure that every machine is always able to repeatedly perform its required operations. A = Operationally critical, one of a kind piece of equipment, or dublicate equipment whith which the loss of one or more would reduce production or affect quality capacity in a cell, department, or workplace. B = Critical equipment for which a local backup may exist, but the loss of which will have an adverse affect on process output/quality. The backup must be shown to be less than 70% to utilize. C = Low cost equipment that is easily replaced and is not critical to business metric results (e.g. run-to-failure equipment). TPM can be applied to manufacturing, support equipment or any piece of office equipment without a backup. NOTE: This typically excludes copiers, printers, scanners, and computers if alternatives are readily available.

DIVE (Define/Investigate/Verify/Ensure)

UTC's problem solving methodology is called DIVE. Define the problem; Investigate to find and correct root causes; Verify that proposed corrective actions will solve the problems; and Ensure that the corrective actions are working effectively.

ACE (Achieving Competitive Excellence)

UTC's proprietary operating system used to ensure world class quality in our products and processes. It is our approach to relentlessly improve the value that we deliver to our customers and investors. ACE is built on 3 elements: 1. Culter and philosophy based on the teaching of the late Yuzuro Ito, the company's advisor on quality methodologies. 2. A set of tools that helps the organization identify process improvement opportunites, solve problems, and assist with decision making processes. 3. The competency, commitment, and involvement of the entire organization.