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Definity Partners is a business improvement firm that serves as a catalyst to transform companies into efficient, more profitable organizations. The company applies the appropriate and leading tools to drive process improvement for organizations across various industry segments.

Six Sigma
Six Sigma is an approach that helps identify and eliminate process errors. It creates an infrastructure of people within the organization, who serve as experts for a pre-defined set of quality management methods. Each Six Sigma project executed within an organization follows a distinct sequence of steps with a clear focus on quantifiable financial results. The process strongly emphasizes passionate management leadership and support, and a clear commitment to making decisions based on verifiable data rather than assumptions.

5S
5S is a Japanese management methodology for organizing a workplace. It primarily targets morale and efficiency. This philosophy of workspace organization and management is designed to improve efficiency by eliminating waste, improving flow and reducing process excessiveness. The method asserts that assigning everything to a specific location will eliminate time wasted searching for items. Advocates of this methodology believe its greatest benefits come from deciding what should be kept, where it should be kept and how it should be stored. 5S instills employee discipline and ownership of the process. The 5S's stand for:

• Sort Through Materials
• Sweep To Maintain Cleanliness
• Straighten or Set Materials In Appropriate Order for Optimum Work Flow
• Schedule Work Practices
• Sustain Order

Lean
Lean production seeks to create more value with less work by eliminating waste. This allows an organization to improve their cost, quality, and delivery without sacrificing one or the other. The process considers expending resources for any other goal besides creating value for the end customer to be wasteful. The identification and elimination of nine wastes is key to a successful lean implementation.

Value Stream Mapping
Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a technique employed to identify and analyze the flow of information and materials that are required to get a product or service to your end customer. During implementation, all processes are identified – from the initial order to customer acceptance. The “perfect” process is then identified and improvement techniques are employed to move the organization towards that state. This methodology allows companies to optimize the entire process rather than sub-optimizing pieces.

Kaizen
Kaizen is Japanese for “change for the better”. The English translation is “continuous improvement”. It comes from the words “kai” (change) and “zen” (make better). At its basic root, kaizen is about continuous improvement. Yet, people often are more familiar with a kaizen “event” or “blitz”. These improvement sessions are aimed at getting all the stakeholders together to quickly improve a process, the deliverables, and the metrics.

OEE
Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is a set of metrics, which are combined to determine operational effectiveness. Three core OEE set-up metrics include:

• Availability: Often referred to as uptime or the percentage of time that the operation is available to operate.
• Performance: The speed that an operation runs as a percentage of the designed speed.
• Quality: Often referred to as first pass yield or the good units produced as a percentage of the total units produced.

Focusing on each metric can radically improve performance.

TPM
Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a proactive approach to prevent issues associated with a process. It focuses on getting operators involved in performing the routine maintenance tasks associated with their machinery. This helps to improve the predictability of performance and increases the ownership of improvements.

Balanced Scorecard
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) was created to ensure that all activities are linked to overall organizational performance. A successful balanced scorecard assigns departmental and individual goals to the achievement of the overall organizational strategy. Scorecards should be applied across all departments within an organization, and they ultimately become the leading indicators of future performance.

TQM
Total Quality Management (TQM) is a business management strategy targeting quality awareness in all organizational processes. This methodology requires member dedication to customer satisfaction in order to advance long-term successes. The TQM culture calls for quality in all aspects of a company's operations, including the elimination of waste and defects. TQM places a strong focus on process measurement and control as means of continuous improvement.