in response, FPL officials made sweeping changes during the months following receipt of the award. The more stringent requirements of Deming’s quality program, though not abandoned, were pushed into the background. The Quality Department was reduced from 85 full-time individuals monitoring the quality teams to 6, and the quality-related departments set up during the award application process to do statistical “quality reviews” were disbanded. The number of tracked “quality indicators” were cut from 41 to 3. First-line supervisors were included in training programs which began to focus on areas other than quality, such as supervisory skills and customer sensitivity. Most significantly, the mandatory, often-dreaded “seven-step process” no longer had to be used for all problem solving.