communication structures involving various management levels require a significant amount of time to resolve even routine issues Focus on efficiency and resource utilization encourages workers and managers to build backlogs, slowing the response to customer requests Trying to minimize costly machine setups, managers and workers resort to running large batch sizes. Large batch sizes result in long run times, leaving other jobs waiting and increasing lead times Making large product quantities to stock leads to high inventory, often prone to inventory obsolescence – when stored products have to be discarded because of market or engineering changes Low skill levels lead to low quality and high levels of rework All these factors contribute to long lead times, ultimately resulting in waste throughout the enterprise such as excessive forecasting, planning, scheduling, expediting, work in progress (WIP), finished goods costs and obsolescence. These increase the overall costs and lower the organization's competitiveness. QRM suggests that an enterprisewide focus on reducing lead times will result in improvements in both quality and cost. Eliminating the time-consuming – and often self-reinforcing – practices described above can lead to large cost savings while improving product quality and customer responsiveness. Hence, on a management level, QRM advocates a mindset change from cost-based to time-based thinking, making short lead times the yardstick for organizational success. Manufacturing Critical-path Time (MCT) QRM's strong focus on lead time reduction requires a comprehensive definition of lead time. To accomplish this, QRM introduces Manufacturing Critical-path Time (MCT). It is based on the standard critical path method; defined as the typical amount of calendar time from when a customer creates an order, until the first piece of that order is delivered to the customer. A metric designed to calculate waste and highlight opportunities for improvement, MCT gives an estimate of the time it takes to fulfill an order, quantifying the longest critical-path duration of order-fulfillment activities. Organizational structure QRM requires four fundamental structural changes to transform a company organized around cost-based management strategies to a time-based focus: Functional to Cellular: Functional departments must be dissolved. In their place, QRM cells become the main organizational unit. QRM cells are more flexible and holistic in their implementation compared to other cell concepts, and can be applied outside the shop floor Top-down Control to Team Ownership: Top-down control of processes by managers and supervisors in departments needs to be transformed to a decision-making structure in which QRM cells