About Pinnacle Partners Inc.

We believe that performance excellence is a journey achieved through vision and strategy deployment, combined with the necessary skills and discipline to enable the entire organization to contribute to meaningful change. While building on current strengths and success, we begin and develop our client relationships through: understanding of and alignment on business strategic direction, translation of business strategy into key improvement and breakthrough opportunities applicable to each operation's value-chain and associated support processes, and application of proven methodologies and strategies that ensure focused action for successful process improvement initiatives tied directly to predefined performance targets.

In assisting our clients in achieving performance excellence, our intent is to transfer the skills and knowledge required to ensure that performance improvement becomes a way of life within the organization. To facilitate comprehensive and lasting transformation we concurrently develop the necessary mindsets, values, attitudes, and leadership skills that are required for your organization to "own" the implementation process.

Through strategic customer-supplier partnerships, Pinnacle Partners provides hands-on, applications-oriented coaching, consulting, and training that directly contributes to personal, team and business improvement. We approach client engagements from an integrated strategy of both organization and operations excellence that creates the greatest opportunity for profound and sustainable improvement in business performance. Our strategy-driven, process-focused, and project-enabled training, consulting and coaching have been successfully offered in the U.S. and international operations of organizations such as Motorola, The National Institute of Healthcare, Precision, Mead Packaging, IBM, The Social Security Administration, NASA, BellSouth, Louisiana-Pacific Corporation, Gallo Winery, International Paper, Copeland Corporation, and Metzeler Automotive Profile Systems.

If you are intent on producing strategic organizational excellence throughout your business,
Pinnacle Partners has the experience, resources, and capability to assist you in your journey.

Meet Our Managing Partners...

Dr. Sophronia Ward has taught and implemented tools of Continual Improvement and Six Sigma in a wide range of industries since 1981. She combines her statistical expertise with team development to offer an integrated approach to implementing continual improvement systems. She developed the popular workshop, SPC: Getting Started and recently co-developed the curriculum and course materials for the seminar, Perfecting Continual Improvement Skills. She also designed the popular SPC software package, improvit. Dr. Ward was one of the founders of the internationally recognized Institute for Productivity through Quality at the University of Tennessee. In addition, she is a featured monthly columnist for Quality magazine under her headline, "Brain Teasers." Dr. Ward received her B.S. in statistics for North Carolina State University and her Ph.D. in statistics from Virginia Tech. She was a professor at the University of Tennessee until 1984. She is a member of the American Statistical Association, the American Society for Quality, the Biometric Society, and the Association for Psychological Type.

Sheila R. Poling has over nineteen years experience in the quality and productivity industry and has managed two consulting firms during this time. She has coauthored two internationally recognized books...Customer Focused Quality, a book on providing exceptional customer satisfaction and service, and Building Continual Improvement; SPC for the Service Industry. She is a member of International Who's Who, Sterling Who's Who and was named one of the "94 Meeting Planners to Watch in 1994" by ConventionSouth Magazine. She has a degree in Business Administration from the University of Tennessee, is a Senior Member of the American Society for Quality, and a member of the American Marketing Association. She has had the privilege to study and work closely with many of the leaders in the process improvement industry including Dr. W. Edwards Deming.

To Access Articles in Quality Magazine written by Dr. Sophronia Ward, visit Brain Teasers.