Serving up the red beads experience

The ‘Red Beads’ exercise popularized by W. Edwards Deming is useful when teaching about quality management, statistical process control, and the management of perople within a manufacturing context. However, students often fail to generalize the lessons to the service setting, which is frequently the venue of their eventual employment. In order to aid in the development of more general understanding, this exercise was devised using an airline example and incorporating many of the principles from Deming's 14 Points.