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The goal in product design or business process engineering is to create products or processes that are insensitive to the sources of variation that inhibit their intended function. The design phase in the product development process is a crucial activity since this is when most downstream production and quality problems are locked-in. As a consequence, […]

Three years ago many best practices already were in place at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The hospital was providing bedside registration, advanced triage protocols, point of care testing and real time radiology. A robust and comprehensive continuous quality improvement program had been established and as a result, higher patient satisfaction scores, […]

GW PLASTICS sees Success with Six Sigma

Much of the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology is concerned with finding differences: Do people do a certain job the same way or are there differences? Will a particular change make a difference in the output? Are there differences in where and when a problem occurs? In most cases, the answer to all these questions is […]

The Canadian government unveiled a plan in 2001 to create an interoperable electronic health record (EHR) for half of the country’s population by 2009. The plan is aimed at increasing healthcare efficiency, hereby helping to address Canada’s critical human resource shortages and potentially saving billions of dollars annually. As part of this effort, many hospitals […]

Many times when Lean and Six Sigma are introduced to an executive management team, there will be an individual who makes the statement: “This is just common sense. Why do we need to go through all this methodology, training and the statistics stuff to execute a simple project?” A large segment of thought leaders in […]

As a set of state-of-the-art tools for solving operations problems, Six Sigma can be used for both continuous and breakthrough improvement. What separates the two is the structure by which they are managed. When managers confuse the two types, the result is usually below-par performance. Even worse, such confusion could result in yet another dead-end […]

“What do you mean, special handling is waste? We can’t stop doing that! Eighty percent of our invoices require special handling!” — Medtronic accounts payable employee, May 24, 2005 Lean Six Sigma at Medtronic Medtronic has combined Lean and Six Sigma to achieve impressive results. In the last two years, Medtronic has graduated 579 Lean […]

University Medical Imaging successfully implemented a Lean and Six Sigma transactional process improvement and training program when delays and other issues began to affect patient satisfaction.

For a software company to make a case for process improvement, reliable measurement data is needed. Unfortunately, that data normally comes from an improvement project. Learn how to address this chicken-and-egg dilemma.

Digital check processing. Fraud detection. Compliance monitoring. Trading floor analytics. These are all integral functions for many modern financial service institutions. And all have one thing in common – they require a huge amount of computing power. One approach to providing fast responses even with highly complex computations is distributed computing, or creating a shared compute […]

Here is a provocation: Quality practices in the pharmaceuticals industry today are what they were in other industries 15 to 20 years ago. It is time to catch up. The regulators recognize it. Pharmaceutical business leaders recognize it. Six Sigma is an opportunity for operations and quality professionals to modernize quality practices. Those who get […]

Project Champions ensure that organizational systems are in place to support the Six Sigma initiative. As managers, they provide exposure of the program to their functional reports and endorsement of the program as a management initiative.

i-nexus Secures Investment

Read any Six Sigma article, attend any Six Sigma conference or talk to any Black Belt and the message is clear – the voice of the customer is a core value of Six Sigma. When Six Sigma is applied with a strategic perspective, the voice of the customer is indeed the necessary starting point. Six Sigma […]

A directory listing of Six Sigma Consultants In India.

iSixSigma’s 2004 Salary Survey for Six Sigma Professionals: Europe This section of iSixSigma’s 2004 Salary Survey for Six Sigma Professionals provides an overview of the average salaries in Europe. Salaries for Black Belts (BB), Master Black Belts (MBB), Champions (CH) and Deployment Leaders (DL) are broken down by levels of education and experience, as well […]

Drawing more than 250 – double the number who attended last year’s initial conference – the second annual conference on Six Sigma in Healthcare offered “Reducing Medical Errors and Improving Quality of Care While Keeping Costs Down” as its theme.

Six Sigma has been adopted by some of the world’s leading companies as a mechanism to improve bottom line results and delight customers. But though the companies have made spectacular gains in some areas – millions of dollars in increased revenue or reduced costs – success has not been uniform. Deploying Six Sigma in areas of […]

How does one strike the right balance between setting strategy and driving tactics? An interview with a business leader shows how dashboards were implemented at his company in order to make the connection between execution and strategies.

Somewhere within the Six Sigma brother/sisterhood are the unwritten rules of hierarchy: Grandmaster Black Belts mentor Master Black Belts, Master Black Belts mentor Black Belts and Black Belts mentor Green Belts. It is a great example of a traditional pyramidal reporting structure. However, within this hierarchy lies a hidden factory of defects. Six Sigma deployments […]

The fact that patients are not entirely safe in a hospital is not breaking news. Errors in healthcare delivery were occurring long before the 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine exposed significant gaps in the healthcare system in the United States. The institute’s report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, found […]

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a tool that appeals to many engineers and designers. It looks so nifty that they think, “There just has to be a place to use this.” Experience shows, though, that with its niftiness comes a certain risk connected with trying to apply QFD in places or in ways that it […]

A P&L manager who is preparing a monthly report starts gathering the information he needs. He realizes that this month’s sales figures are not broken out by region, so he calls accounting and asks for the regional split as quickly as possible. He also discovers that he has updates on only three of the four […]

The experience of a European life insurance provider highlights the lessons learned from transferring Lean from the shop floor to the office as well as providing a deployment model that integrates Lean, Six Sigma and process management.

Design of experiments (DOE) is a useful tool for determining specific factors affecting defect levels in a product. A major automotive company learned just how valuable this tool is when it conducted a study of defects occurring in its alternator product. DOE was applied to identify the cause of ventilation noise within the alternator, a […]

A DMAIC project at New York-Presbyterian Hospital improved throughput – case start time, room turnaround time and patient prep time – in three cardiac cath labs.

Interest in Six Sigma is growing rapidly within the professional project management community, and the most common question coming from that group is something like “How does Six Sigma relate to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK)?” Six Sigma and PMBoK do have connections, similarities and distinctions. Before diving into specifics, a little background […]

Is Six Sigma just a fad – another flavor-of-the-month initiative that will blow over in a few years? Without proper leadership, what is labeled Six Sigma in some organizations may indeed fall by the wayside. However, done right, the tools, methods and culture that are true Six Sigma will be here for decades to come. And […]

Liquid Controls, a manufacturer of high-quality flow meters and accessories for accurate liquid measurement, is a well-practiced user of Six Sigma methodologies. Having adopted Six Sigma in 1999 and made significant strides in improving manufacturing processes, the company more recently began to turn attention to transactional processes for serving customers. Liquid Controls identified several processes […]

Up Close and Personal With Six Sigma

Often considered an island unto itself, technology development and implementation does not really occur in a vacuum. However, the interrelated nature of managerial, quality and technological systems, and the inherent benefits of a truly integrated view are not necessarily evident to the information technology (IT) professional. Consequently, increasing implementation costs and an array of idiosyncratic […]

“…It is not possible to find in all geometry more difficult and intricate questions, or more simple and lucid explanations. Some ascribe this to his natural genius; while others think that incredible effort and toil produced these, to all appearances, easy and unlaboured results. No amount of investigation of yours would succeed in attaining the […]

Instantis Recruits Industry Veteran Don Redinius As Six Sigma Executive Advisor

PowerSteering Software Announces Strategic Alliance with Six Sigma Academy

This book provides step-by-step guidance on how to use the Six Sigma DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and Verify) methodology to design products, services, and processes that reliably meet customers’ and stakeholders’ requirements.

New Pegasystems Enterprise Application Provides Central Hub For Proactively Managing Operational Exceptions

Data mining via vector analysis is a powerful, flexible process observation tool. With due regard for the possibility of correlation/causation fallacies, data mining can be used by almost anyone.

Once a healthcare organization has decided that Six Sigma can be an effective approach to improving the many services it delivers, the question then becomes how does it know where to start implementing the methodology’s statistical process tools. Process issues or variability in healthcare may exist around a particular piece of technology, within a certain […]

It is common to hear great claims of monetary benefits from various improvement initiatives. But how confident can a company be that those “benefits” – both cost saving and generation of additional revenue – actually impacted the bottom line? BHP Billiton Base Metals considered this question and found an answer through the involvement of its finance department […]

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 […]

As startling as the 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine was – estimating that medical errors may cause 98,000 deaths annually – a new national study indicates the problem may actually be much worse. According to the report released in July by HealthGrades, a Denver-based healthcare ranking group, the number of hospital patients who […]

“Why bother about process improvement? Let’s do it right the first time. We don’t need process improvement. We have to implement DFSS!” This is a common theme from engineering people in Six Sigma deployments. A common response from practitioners is that DMAIC should be implemented first; experience with the methodology should come before the introduction […]

Most people would agree that customers are the most important part of a business – no customers, no business. In order to be successful, a business must know who its customers are and what the expectations of those customers are for the product or service the business sells. In Six Sigma, that process is known […]

An emerging trend – which can justifiably be labeled as a case of “Mad Belt Disease” – may be threatening the long-term credibility and success of Six Sigma. It is time for practitioners of Six Sigma to help stem the spread of what is beginning to look like an epidemic. This disturbing trend is the increasingly […]

Dr. Joseph M. Juran, “Architect Of Quality,” Celebrates 100th Birthday

Corporate innovation and Six Sigma go hand in hand if the methodology is fully utilized. That was the conclusion of participants in a lively discussion at the International Society of Six Sigma Professionals (ISSSP) conference in June.

iSixSigma’s 2004 Salary Survey for Six Sigma Professionals: Continental Asia/Africa This section of iSixSigma’s 2004 Salary Survey for Six Sigma Professionals provides an overview of the average salaries in Continental Asia/Africa. Salaries for Black Belts (BB), Master Black Belts (MBB), Champions (CH) and Deployment Leaders (DL) are broken down by levels of education and experience, […]

Surveys surround us. The questions come via the mail, face to face in shopping malls, on the telephone, and increasingly over the Internet – a multitude of surveys, but many of them fail to achieve their goals. The fault often lies with those who design and administer the surveys with good intentions, but without the […]

iSixSigma’s 2004 Salary Survey for Six Sigma Professionals: Pacific Nations This section of iSixSigma’s 2004 Salary Survey for Six Sigma Professionals provides an overview of the average salaries in Pacific Nations (Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Pacific islands). Salaries for Black Belts (BB), Master Black Belts (MBB), Champions (CH) and Deployment Leaders (DL) are broken down by […]