Tim Williams

It will probably come as little surprise that something called failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) evolved at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, an environment where the interest in preventing failures is extremely high. FMEA was later popularized by the automobile industry and in recent years has become more widespread among Six Sigma practitioners. […]

Software can be a helpful tool but it is not a magic wand. After investing half a million dollars in tracking software for its call center and still seeing a high volume of complaints, one company used DMAIC to turn a disaster into a success.

The managers of a lockbox operation in the upper Midwest were not at all pleased. The corporate clients for whom they processed millions of dollars in payments were very intolerant of errors. Yet in the first months of a new quality improvement effort, the error rate per 100,000 transactions doubled from 15 to 30. Truth […]