Category: Blogs

Six Sigma Academy has announced that Mikel J. Harry, author of Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World’s Top Corporations, and founder of Six Sigma Academy, will rejoin the firm as Vice Chairman & Chief Knowledge Officer. This is big news for the Six Sigma community and as well as a strategic move […]

Gauging organizational maturity is one of the most critical tasks undertaken prior to the implementation of Lean / Six Sigma. Not only is it important relative to determining where to start, it’s also an indicator of how much of a cultural shift will be required to make sure the methodology sticks. The U.S. military seems […]

Recently I had a call from a well known training company in Englandwho were planning a Six Sigma Lean Government workshop in February of 2007. He did not ask about successes, or best practices, he wanted to know the major difficulties with our Lean initiative in Maine. Thinking about it, I reached the conclusion that […]

My organization is embarking on a new frontier: teaching our own version of DMAIC to new Green Belts and Black Belts. For our first three waves, we used the material provided by our consultant.Now we’re ready (we think) to customize it with our own organization’s goals and culture. The original training focused on the DMAIC […]

A new colleague spoke to me the other day saying “if you really want, I have a problem in my department that you can fix”.

As I drove home this afternoon, I noticed workers attaching Christmas wreaths to the local real estate office. Call me crazy but I think it’s way too early to be adding snowmen and Santa to the landscaping. I mean it’s not even Halloween yet! Not to show my age or anything but I can remember […]

Deciding to go lean is very popular in today’s business climate. Eliminating overproduction and reducing excessive inventory (along with waste) is a must. If you’re a black-belt, you’re role may be central to the lean transformation (depending on the organization). Although there are many benefits to leaning-out operations, especially in a batch processing operation, there are […]

Implementing – Pay for Skills I recently led an initiative to implement a pay for performance structure within my employer’s Production department. While management unanimously believed the idea was excellent, I was challenged as to whether or not this constituted a Six Sigma project.“I though Six Sigma was about reducing costs. This project looks like […]

Yesterday (9th October 2006) I heard that Edmund Phelps was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Economics for his theories developed in the 1960’s on the interplay between inflation expectations and unemployment. This showed that there is a “natural” rate of unemployment, a level below which inflation pressures are likely to intensify. His theories led […]

October 2, 2006 – Eweek published an interesting article by Peter Coffee titled “What it means to be Lean”.  He correlates computer programming with lean thinking and describes a new book related to lean software. “I just received a new book with a copyright date of 2007, “Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash,” by […]

One of the toughest challenges that a manufacturing black-belt faces is institutionalizing data collection systems that yield project-critical information. Whether the needed data is attribute or variable, it is still a tough challenge to implement the system.Once the GR&R issues are resolved, it doesn’t get any easier. At this point, the black-belt has to make […]

One of my favorite pieces of music is Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” In it, Britten decomposes then reconstitutes a fugal work for orchestra based on a much older tune by Henry Purcell. The work is somewhat unusual in that at Britten’s request, a friend wrote narration that describes textually exactly […]

The American Society for Quality had an attorney send iSixSigma a cease and desist letter the other day for an article iSixSigma published back in 2001. In the article, Charles Waxer wrote, “ASQ only started offering certification a year or so ago.” This was in fact true in 2001, but since we don’t include a […]

To a black-belt, looking at problems from a SIPOC point of view comes naturally… creating process flow maps, identifying potential inputs, identifying internal and external customers, etc. These activities are (or should be) core to implementing a given black-belt project. To an engineer that has not been though six-sigma training, many times these processes are […]

A group of Black Belts and I were recently discussing change management. One of the group pointed out that we don’t do a very good job preparing stakeholders for “The Dip.” “The Dip” iscommonly part of the Improve phase. We’ve measured and analyzed the heck out of our current process, brainstormed our way into improvement […]

I attended the IQPC Lean Six Sigma West Summit in Las Vegas from September 27-29, along with fellow blogger Michael Marx and the rest of the CTQ Media team. On Wednesday I gave a presentation entitled “From Good to Great Six Sigma: 5 Imperatives for Making the Leap.” Many delegates who attended the presentation asked for […]

Nayism 34: Every year our company sets unreasonable Six Sigma financial goals and we have to scurry around to find projects to meet them. It’s just too much for our organization to cope with. This is a common nayism heard in organizations with a culture of “business as usual.” Should they back off a bit […]

Consider you require a service in August and get feedback that you are waitlisted 6th (with 5 requests before yours) due to lack off resources. The outlook is that somewhere in September you’ll be helped. You decide to live with this answer and patiently wait. The remainder of August and September pass by and off […]

Just three of the IQPC team that worked tirelessly to make the conference a success. The George Group Larry Goldman and Mark Briscoe of Decisioneering Eric Nadler of iGrafx The Instantis Team jmp on a customer demo The Quality Group SigmaFlow showcasing Coach SixNet Intelligence System Clark Swain of NIMBUS Richard Teerlink book signing The […]

Richard Teerlink, Former Chairman of Harley-Davidson, taught us that we need to embrace change if we are to be successful. He opened with a quote from Eric Hoffer: “In the times of change the learners will inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world than no longer exists.” […]

Nayism 33: Our department has had several Black Belts who completed projects that drove positive change but since they have been repatriated, it’s been business as usual. If this Six Sigma stuff was that good, why don’t the Black Belts keep doing projects once they return to the organization? Here’s a perfect example of how […]

Day two began with remarks by Steve Dubrow, today’s conference chair. Richard Goldberg, Vice President of Corporate Quality at Cisco gave a terrific overview of Cisco Lean. First he explained what Cisco Lean is: Cisco Lean is going: •From push to pull •From higher inventory levels to inventory reduced across supply chain •From redundant processes […]

We saw the King! A special sign just for us. Debby Sollenberger and Joe Ficalora of Sigma Breakthrough Technologies (SBTI) Tracee Beebe and Bryan Carey of DeLeeuw Associates. One cool Steve DuBrow of i-Solutions The one, the only, Chris Paret showcasing the Quality Companion 2. Additional Conference Photos IQPC Day Two: Photos

Today must be the day for metaphors; Raj Gohil, Process Fitness Master Consultant for BP, Lubricants Americas, taught us what it takes to make a Six Sigma project successful by telling intriguing stories that he learned from his father and grandfather. He even threw in a Confucius quote. Each story had its own business analogy […]