Achieving Competitive Excellence (ACE)
Introduction
ACE (Achieving Competitive Excellence) is a company-wide strategy. It is our approach to relentlessly improve the value that we deliver to our customers and investors. It focuses on the drivers of customer and investor value: our processes and the people who run them.

ACE stands on three foundations:

A philosophy about competitive excellence;
An operating system (with tools) for controlling and improving our processes and eliminating waste.
The competence, commitment, and involvement of the entire organization to live the philosophy and to apply the operating system to everything that we do.

ACE involves all employees leaders and associates alike and it touches all of our manufacturing, business, and supporting processes that create and deliver customer value. ACE solicits feedback from our customers on what we need to do to strengthen our value to them and to increase their satisfaction with us. ACE also seeks feedback on where our business, product, or service performance has fallen short. ACE is the way that we control and improve processes that deliver customer satisfaction and business results. ACE is how we solve problems, make critical decisions, and eliminate waste. And ACE drives our partners and suppliers to match our level of competitive excellence.

In short, ACE is the way that we run our business.


ACE Tools

ACE tools are as follows:

New 5S
A state where anyone can walk into a workplace and visually understand the current situation.

5S stands for:

Sort - Eliminate what is not needed.
Straighten - Organize what remains.
Shine - Clean Work Area.
Standardize - Schedule Cleaning and Maintenance.
Sustain - Make New 5S a way of life.

Process Management (PM)

Process Management is a disciplined approach to achieve business process effectiveness, efficiency, and agility.

Standard work (SW)
A method for carrying out work consistently using current best practices from both process and product knowledge.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)
TPM is a method to achieve maximum equipment effectiveness through employee involvement.

Quality Clinic Process Charts (QCPC)
QCPC is a simple tool used to continuously analyze a process for quality improvement opportunities and process inefficiencies, or "turnbacks".

QCPC is a five-step process

Initiate the QCPC process.
Summarize detailed turnback data.
Pareto Turnback Data.
Determine Improvement Projects.
Document your successes.

Relentless Root Cause Analysis (RRCA)
The rapid and persistent pursuit of the fundamental breakdown or failure of the process that, when resolved, prevents a recurrence of the problem.

Mistake Proofing (MP)
Using wisdom and ingenuity to provide methods and devices that allow you to do your job 100% defect free 100% of the time. The three levels of Mistake Proofing are

Passport Review Process
A set of reviews integrated with the program deployment process designed to ensure all problems are identified in the deployment cycle before moving to the next stage.