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In any financial service process that is being studied for the first time, it’s common for Six Sigma teams to spend one-third to one-half of their project time on data collection alone. Here are three tips that can help you get off to a faster start.

During recent decades, a number of different methodologies have evolved to help organizations improve quality, speed and efficiency, and better serve their customers. Manufacturing businesses have concentrated primarily on the ISO system, a series of increasingly tough manufacturing benchmarks and requirements developed by the International Standards Organization, and Lean manufacturing (originally known as the Toyota […]

GE Healthcare And Virtua Health Collaborate To Redefine 21st Century Patient Care Delivery

North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System Gaining Ground Through Partnership With GE Healthcare At Two-Year Mark, Achievements are Multiplying Across the Enterprise

People who have successfully implemented Lean Six Sigma all say the same thing: Having the best data, tools and improvement methods in the world is no substitute for having effective teams. Lean Six Sigma is about leveraging the knowledge, energy and passion of the whole team – Green Belts, process owners, Black Belts and other team […]

By understanding the differences and the commonalities between local processes, European businesses can start to assemble a pan-European process to satisfy the needs of each country, opening the door for process standardization and resource pooling. Processes which deliver value to customers across a wide geographic area in the United States are considerably less complex than […]

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 […]

iSixSigma’s 2004 Salary Survey for Six Sigma Professionals has two unique perspectives. First, the survey provides a global view. Second, unlike other quality salary surveys, this one is focused as specifically as possible on Six Sigma professionals. By Matthew LeVeque, iSixSigma Senior Contributing Writer During the past 10 years Six Sigma has become one of […]

On March 10, 2010 a free webcast is being held to discuss a standard for Six Sigma Black Belt Certification.http://www.moresteam.com/morenews/webcast031010.cfm

I never cease to be amazed at the amount of information that’s “out there” on the web. I searched on “Lean Six Sigma” and got about a million hits. “Process Improvement” – 3.6 million.”Change Management” – 6.2 million. “Project Management” – 32 million. But lately I’ve been using an additional source of information-the ever-growing on-line […]

This was handed out at an all-hands today – not my words, and a great reminder of why we do what we do. I am your customer. Satisfy my wants, add personal attention and a friendly touch, and I will become a walking advertisement for your products and services. Ignore my wants, show carelessness, inattention […]

When I teach lean tools, I naturally reference the Toyota Production System and talk about their journey (which they don’t call lean!) as an introduction to the topic. Naturally, in the healthcare setting, I don’t dwell on the assembly-line function too much, but I have always felt that it’s helpful to put the approach in […]

Have you completed a process improvement project that has saved your company millions, delivered breakthroughs in productivity or safety, or grown its top-line? Do you have an inspirational story to tell and lessons learned from your experiences with CPI in the energy industry? Let iSixSigma know what topic you would like to present or see […]

It’s been a full week since the iSixSigma Live! Summit & Awards in Miami, and I’m still digesting the full meal of process improvement informationserved during those four days. As Steve Wilson of Quality Conversations mentioned in his opening address, nooneleft the conference”hungry” last week. Now that I’m back to my office routine, there are […]

The streets of the French Quarter are no doubt still packed with happy Saints fans following Sunday’s surprising and convincing win against the favored Colts. As first-time champs, it’s a feeling the players and fans will never forget. We at iSixSigma are also enjoying the afterglow of a first-time Bowl event: iSixSigma’s Project Bowl contest, […]

At the recent iSixSigma Live! Summit & Awards in Miami, attendees got something to sing along to. J.D. Sicilia shared a song, called “Lean, Lean, Lean” before his presentation on “Performance Management in the Worldâ??s Largest Organization.” Sicilia is the director of the Lean Six Sigma Program Office at the U.S. Department of Defense. Not only […]

Those whotake mass transitto work know the frustration of trying to make an important meeting only to discover the bus is not at the stop at its appointed time. The same goes for students who are trying to make that all-important class and get to the stop just as the bus is pulling away from […]

I am personally gratefully for the Toyota quality.

  In a couple of days, Miami will be aflame withSuper Bowl fever. South Beach’s Ocean Driveis sure to be covered in either blue-and-white or black-and-gold confetti on Sunday night, depending on who holds up the Lombardi Trophy. Earlier this week, however, there were some other trophieshoisted maybe not with quite as much hoopla as […]