Division of Quality and Environmental Management Total Quality Management for Sustainable Development- Focus on Processes

• Main Author: Raine Isaksson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2004
• Subjects: Roland; Luleå
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.112.3081; http://ies.ltu.se/kml/publikationer/doctoral/raine_isaksson.pdf

It has been quite a long and tedious, but rewarding research journey. It started in the autumn of 1996, with the help and encouragement of Håkan Wiklund and Pia Sandvik Wiklund. Professor Bengt Klefsjö was kind and courageous enough to accept me as PhD student without much more than the recommendations of Håkan and Pia. The start was complicated by a simultaneous change of employment, which sent me to a country in Sub Saharan Africa as a Production Manager for a cement plant. The journey would have stopped short without my wife Monika, who has stoically taken the extra burden of household and family tasks. Ellen and Fred, only 4 and 2 years of age when moving to Africa, have their first images of a father sitting in a small room called the “cement nesting box”, hanging over a computer and a pile of books. The “cement nesting box” has since been moved to Visby on Gotland, but with the same image prevailing more than 7 years later. As a distance student my visits to the Division of Quality Technology and Statistics, later the Division of Quality & Environmental Management, have been very important. Without any exception I have always been received with friendship and getting more than the help I have been asking for. Many people like Jonas, Maria, Magnus, Peter and Roland, to mention a few, have willingly shared their time. But most of all this has been done by Rickard Garvare, who with all his family, also has been an excellent host during my visits to Luleå. During the research journey I have had continuous help from Håkan and Bengt in seeing that the action part of making cement does not take over too much. On the side of making cement my colleague and friend Neil Taylor has worked with me on many of the cases helping me with the necessary critical peer review, and he has also contributed with valuable suggestions concerning both cement and improvement theory.