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Looking for good books to read on the topics of quality, Six Sigma, Lean and OpEx? This reading list shares the best quality-topic books of all-time and book recommendations by topic.

It is a time of change. The world is developing faster with each passing day. Continuous process improvement technologies, which could make these changes more significant and effective, trail far behind this trend. Who suffers? Companies that lose competition, people who cannot find a new place in the changed labor market and countries that are […]

iSixSigma.com is pleased to introduce its new Editorial Advisory Board.

Lean Six Sigma Green Belts are part-time improvement professionals who complete Lean Six sigma projects in their area of work experience.

Healthcare is a heavily regulated industry and requires substantial amounts of paperwork. Paperwork may not be as pressing as patient care, but it must be done in a timely fashion. A Lean Six Sigma project reduced the task delinquency rate in its residency program.

A Green Belt project aimed at reducing the cycle time for purchase orders finds the bottleneck and dramatically improves the process, exceeding the project’s original goals, and even realizes bonus benefits.

Using the DMAIC methodology, a Green Belt project aims to reduce the cycle time for purchase orders and straighten up a direction-less process.

SigmaXL Inc., a leading provider of user-friendly Excel Add-ins for Statistical and Graphical analysis, announces the release of SigmaXL Version 8.1.

In order to achieve White Belt certification, 21 students works on eight projects ranging from improving the taste of chocolate chip cookies to increasing tourism in Nauru and having more successful birthday parties.

Why wait until college or later to learn Lean Six Sigma? Twenty-one middle and high school students in Cary, North Carolina, achieved their White Belt certifications in the summer of 2018.

Here’s the story about how the hypothesis testing flow chart was developed in Barcelona in 1995, as told by Mike Carnell.

The City of Fayetteville, North Carolina, faced a staffing crisis in its Finance department. Thanks to a DMAIC project, in just 14 weeks the City was able to turn the department’s chaos around.

There are seven success factors for why Six Sigma is a proven effective business change initiative.

Although many LSS organizations focus their improvement efforts solely on reducing costs, cost savings are chump change when compared to the revenue implications of delivering an enhanced customer experience. Learn how to quantify – and achieve – five categories of financial benefit beyond cost savings.

The best of iSixSigma 2018 features the highlights of this year’s content – those best loved by our readers.

A form is a document that has a set template for the presentation of data or information. Format is the layout with which the data is presented.

Part 2 of this series presents a case study of the redesign of a bracket’s fatigue model. The case study shows how UQ techniques can be used to perform robust risk estimation, identify key drivers of manufacturing variability and gather more information for critical decisions.

Learn to combine Six Sigma with UQ – advanced statistical techniques that, when applied to simulations of complex systems, generate actionable results to reduce process variability.

After more than six months of hard work, iSixSigma is celebrating its relaunch today and I’m excited to announce the brand new, redesigned iSixSigma.com.

Waste is all around us. Reducing waste in your process will free up resources and make your process more efficient, save money, increase capacity, and a whole host of other benefits.

In business, it is necessary to have a solid understanding of what, exactly, is going into your processes. After all, if you do not know your inputs, how can you expect to be able to keep your output outcome desirable, repeatable, and consistent? Your X’s play a massive role in the outcomes you achieve. In […]

Have you seen the Lean Six Sigma rainbow of Belt colors? There is White, Yellow, Green, and Black. Let’s explore Yellow.

A Z value is a data point’s position between the mean and another location as measured by the number of standard deviations. Z is a universal measurement because it can be applied to any unit of measure. Z is a measure of process capability and corresponds to the process sigma value that is reported by […]

If it relies or revolves around the internet, chances are it counts as web-based technology. This concept encompasses a significant vertical and horizontal scope, which means it includes many different kinds of technology, products and services. Overview: What is web-based technology (WBT)? Web-based technology (WBT) is a broad umbrella term that encompasses many different types […]

You may have heard of “white noise” when it comes to signal processing, but this is not the only application for the term. It is also a way to describe data in modeling. When we reference “white noise” in modeling, the “noise” is in reference to there being no set pattern and all variations being […]

Can your organization really achieve zero defects in everything it does? Probably not, but it is a worthy goal to shoot for. Let’s learn more about the concept and how it might help your organization do better.

The letter Z is not just the sign of Zorro or a segment on “Sesame Street.” It also has a number of statistical connotations. Let’s explore those and more.

The probability of a defect when defects are correlated. For example, when linewidths are printed too wide the process can cause thousands of ‘bridging’ defects, so although the number of defects is extremely high, there is only one opportunity. Unless of course there are say four sensitive areas on the circuit so that a slight […]

Work cells are a key lean six sigma strategy designed to improve quality, eliminate waste, and enhance the end-user experience.

In a regression model, there will be an amount of variation that is unexplained by x, unless r squared equals 100%. When you are working with a regression model, there is a chance that you will encounter an amount of variation that is unexplained. This variation, nevertheless, needs to be accounted for and checked to […]

In an organization, it is important that there are members of a team to look to when leadership is required. These members may rise to this higher level of responsibility naturally through their skills or personalities, or they may be put in such a position by management.Being a team leader requires more from you than […]

Is there a simple graphical tool for looking at a series of linked hierarchical activities? Yes, a tree diagram would be a good one to use. Let’s see how it would work. If you have a series of hierarchical tasks and subtasks to complete before you reach some objective, then a tree diagram would allow […]

Gain a better understanding of value stream mapping and how you can use it in your business. We’ll cover the flow, department interactions, bottleneck identification, and key metrics — as well as a few best practices.

A U chart is one of four quality control charts that engineers use to track variation in a manufacturing process. The other three typical quality control charts are the p chart (which plots the proportion of defective items, the c chart (which shows the number of defects), and the np chart (which shows the number […]

Visual Quality Document

Being busy and working hard don’t necessarily mean what you are doing will have value to your customer. Let’s see why not.

It’s not practical to measure every value in a population, whether it be people or all the jars of peanut butter you produced. Taking samples helps. But if your samples are biased and don’t represent the population, then you have a biased statistic or estimator. Let’s learn how you can calculate an unbiased statistic.

When there seem to be more problems than can reasonably be dealt with, which is the right analytical tool to better your chances of spending precious time on those crucial few problems that will have the greatest impact on quality?

A good introduction to dealing with variables in a data set is to start with univariate statistics. The analysis of this type of data is the simplest. When analyzing variables in a data set, you will conduct either multivariate, bivariate, or univariate analysis. This will be dependent on the number of variables and how many […]

Are you ready to dust off your calculus differential equations and Laplace transformations? No? Then we will have to provide a simpler discussion of what a transfer function, or Y=f(X), is all about. 

Tribal knowledge is the information regarding a product or service process that resides only in the minds of the employees. Familiarize yourself with how non-documented tribal knowledge creates inefficiencies within the process, and understand the benefits of addressing these gaps.

Proper WIP management creates both quick wins and long term improvements. Here’s what you need to know.

Defects in quality put a severe dent in the potential profits of companies all over the world year after year. Having an understanding of the total probability of defect puts the power in an organization’s hands to make improvements and reduce the chance of its customers receiving faulty products.Knowing the total probability of defect for […]

Sometimes you really need to look at problems in a creative and innovative manner. TRIZ is a problem-solving approach that fosters invention for project teams who have become stuck while trying to solve a business challenge.  TRIZ (Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadach) is a problem-solving methodology that was developed in the former Soviet Union by Genrich […]

Do your processes deliver value for your customer? How do you know if what you do is valued by your customer? Let’s find out.

When you hear the word variance, you can think of it in terms of finance or statistics. In statistics, variance is a calculation describing the spread, or variation, of the data around the average, or mean, of the data.

If you hear someone say, “Darn, I didn’t expect that to happen”, they are probably experiencing an unintended consequence from some action they took. No one plans for things to go awry, but unfortunately, they do.

If you have a question about how your process or organization is performing, statistics will be the methodology for answering those questions. Statistics is the discipline and science used for the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of your data. Statistics usually fall into one of two categories: Descriptive statistics: methods used to summarize or […]

The term standard order refers to the sequence of the runs you will do in your Design of Experiments. The question we will answer is whether to use the standard order or a random order.

An SS product report is a critical document that summarizes the results of the product development process, including quality, reliability, and performance. Understanding SS Product Reports The Six Sigma methodology is a highly effective process improvement approach that has been widely adopted across various industries. It provides a data-driven and customer-focused approach to reduce defects […]