ABSTRACT
Every organization wants to achieve the highest levels of performance possible. Yet to do so almost always requires a delicate balancing act of some critical set of variables that affect performance. For example, few if any companies can afford to focus solely on quality while completely ignoring cost, productivity, cycle time, and the safety of their operations. Instead, they must divide their efforts among these critical performance factors so that optimum-but not necessarily maximum and equal-effort is spent on each.
