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As a former forklift operator, I can understand the complexities of forklift operations. I know absolutely nothing about forklift manufacturing, but one could argue that it might be harder to operate a forklift than build one… The very first Six Sigma project I ever heard about involved a forklift. It perked my interest, because naturally, […]

I was talking with a group of people about leading lean, and someone asked me, “Are you a Sensei?” So of course I said “No!” I don’t call myself a Sensei, because I consider myself to be at the grasshopper-level of lean expertise. However, the question did make me think. I call myself a Black […]

Last Friday I taught a Lean Leadership class for my healthcare organization. The participants included all levels of support staff, physicians, nurses, anddepartment leaders. They grasped the concepts easily, and we had a lot of fun with the simulation exercise. In the first round, of course, no products made it to the customer. In the […]

If your customers rate you a “7” on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the best), do your customer ratings range from 6 to 8 or do they range from 4 to 10? What would you do with this information?

AIG Said to Offer $1 Billion in Retention Payments to Employees As it turns out, this how AIG is choosing to spend part of the $150 Billion it received from the US Government, with much of it going to the very business units that caused AIG to falter in the first place. While the company […]

Photos stream of the iSixSigma Live! Summit and Awards in Miami. To browse all photos and download your favorites visit: http://photos.isixsigma.com/gallery/7136980_gHfnR

It seems like a month can not go by without some large scale food recall, with the latest being approximately 31 million pounds of peanut butter (due to salmonella contamination). I started to wonder what the sigma level for the aforementioned peanut butter would look like. According to a major news website, at least 500 […]

Michael Cyger moderated a panel with Mikel Harry and Don Linsenmann. Together they put on a good show, fielding questions from Mike as well as the audience. Don, as usual, instill humor into just about every story he tells. On the economy and Six Sigma: Don: “We’re all impacted by this downfall. Take initiative. Let […]

As an iSixSigma Blogs reader I invite you to participate in iSixSigma’s latest survey on Six Sigma in the supply chain. This short survey will explore how Six Sigma and other process improvement methodologies, including supply chain models such as SCOR, are being used to optimize supply chain activities. It will also look at how […]

Over 200 energy industry professionals will gather in Houston, Texas, May 19-22 for iSixSigma Live’s premiere Energy Forum for Process Excellence, supported by Chevron, Halliburton, Hess and Marathon Oil. Here’s your chance to be one of the speakers. Click here for the speaking proposal form: https://www.isixsigma.com/KQ5 We’re especially looking for process improvement professionals who can […]

I spent the Wednesday afternoon in the Deployment Models breakout session with Bob Crescenzi, from NewPage, Pam Cagle from Wal-Mart, and Stephen Turnipseed from Chevron. Each company is deploying Six Sigma with a different approach. Bob Crescenzi made a great point kicking off the discussions. He said, “There is no vanilla deployment.” Top-down, middle-out, or […]

“Do you have the courage to lead?”

I was very honored to have been nominated for the iSixSigma MVP Award for “Best Blogger” – given the high quality of my fellow nominees, Robin Barnwell and Gianna Clark, I was not expecting to receive this recognition! Attending the iSixSigma Live! conference was a blast, and I had a lot of fun and met […]

The iSixSigma Live! Miami Summit and Awards opened yesterday with a bang.Richard Willet, Jr., President and CEO of NewPage kicked off the morning session. Rick gave an enthusiastic overview of Lean Six Sigma at NewPage. There was so much he spoke about, but one of the points really stuck me as unique. He said that […]

Well we did it. We announced the order of the Top Ten iSixSigma Best Places to Work list this morning. If you were following my tweets this morning you already heard where the No. 1 place is… if not, here we go… #10 Rio Tinto Alcan #9 Volt Information Sciences Inc. #8 EMC Corp. #7 […]

I had the privilege of presenting the iSixSigma MVP Awards this morning to a fine group of Six Sigma professionals. The MVP Awards are iSixSigma’s way of recognizing those people who volunteer their time and expertise making iSixSigma.com and the iSixSigma Blogosphere meaningful places to learn. Without purse or script, these knights and nobles selfishly […]

The iSixSigma Live! Awards ceremony went off beautifully this morning. Congratulations to all the finalists, and woo hooo! to all the winners! Winners: Largest-Breakthrough Improvement Projects * Environment – Bell Helicopter, Textron Inc. for “Compressed Air Savings Headstart (CASH)” * Supply chain – General Dynamics for “Submarine Material Receipt Inspection” * Transactional – North Shore-LIJ […]

Targets appear in all shapes & sizes. Sometimes seen as positive, “we operate a target-driven culture” and sometimes negative, “targets drive the wrong behaviour”. So what is true? Given the sheer diversity of targets, I want to focus on a specific area, daily work targets in a services environment. Let’s look at a scenario. Imagine […]

It’s a busy week for us here at iSixSigma. The final day leading to the iSixSigma Live! Summit& Awards in Miami… If you tweet you’re in for a treat.I’ll betweeting live from Miami. Follow the iSixSigma tweetfor mini updates on what I’m up to at the conference. Be the first to readthe winners of the […]

Happy New Year! Today, rather than talk about something deeply insightful I thought I would share one of the tools I like to use. Ever had to arrange a project meeting? Did you need to get say 10 people’s diaries aligned, usually at short notice? Was it fun? There are many ways to approach this […]

While scanning news for lean and six sigma related articles this morning, I came across this gem: “Six Sigma Certification Booms as Employment Busts” – it was actually a press release posing as news over on msnbc.com. That’s fine – I recall from my days in media relations that many news outlets craved pre-written content, […]

This year, I’m making a resolution to do a good deed daily. This is inspired in part by Gianna Clark’s latest blog, How W.O.W.?, but also by my own sense of imbalance in the customer feedback that most organizations receive. I’ve communicated about problems and complaints many times – but – I realized that I […]

If you are providing your Customers with a W.O.W. experience, you will know it. If you are not, you will know it as well.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how the Toyota Production System was developed. Unlike those of us who have books, websites, and training programs in abundance, Toyota engineers took their process of assembly-line manufacture of automobiles and created, in incremental steps, the methodology that’s now known as Lean. It took shape over a […]

“Perhaps what you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is all you’ll get. What you don’t (or can’t) measure is lost” – H. Thomas Johnson Those of you who are Deming fans may liken this quote to Deming’s admonition that “the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown […]

This is just for fun and to win a real prize you need to have been very good all year and have a generous expense account. Good old Santa wants to give you a Christmas present. He’s checked if you have been naughty or nice and the news is not good, so you have to […]

Well, it’s time for my annual Christmas Blog! With apologies to Charles Dickens, here is my adapted version of his “Ghost Story of Christmas” (first published in 1843). ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Stave 1: Muda’s Ghost The workers at the Shusendo & Muda Company are very busy being highly productive. The boss, Ebenezer Shusendo, only gives performance bonuses […]

I got this from a friend and decided to share it with my friends at Six Sigma. I thought this might represent the process many use when they don’t plan. Just get the job done. Don’t worry about process or structure or planning. Just do it. Hm…. You think a value stream map would help? […]

Last year iSixSigma Magazine ran a cover story on PointRoll and the beginnings of their Six Sigma initiative. PointRoll, a leading online ad agency, is a small company by Fortune 500 revenue standards (less than 100 million in revenue) and even smaller Six Sigma company by Six Sigma standards (1 Black Belt and 7 Green […]

We’ve all seen the “resistance curve” where a few people are innovators, some are early adopters, early and late majorities, and a few are laggards, or skeptics, or what-have-you (from the work of Everett Rogersand other researchers). One way to get almost everyone to be an early adopter is to offer something of value – […]

NewPage Corp. is the cover story in the November/December 2008 issue of iSixSigma Magazine. “From its inception three years ago, NewPage planned to make Lean Six Sigma an integral part of how the company was run. The paper producer is using the methodology to connect its amalgam of mills in a common culture and to […]

Six Sigma, which is beginning to acquire some grey around the temples, has now advanced to the stage where the basic requirements for success of the program are fairly well known. That doesn’t stop it from being screwed up in about 95% of installations, but no one can say that’s due to a lack of […]

iSixSigma Live Summit ’09 Update – Reception & Keynote Trump International Beach Resort Miami, Florida 5:30-7:30 P.M., Tuesday, January 13, 2009 Six Sigma Wine Tasting and Welcome Reception Hosted by Six Sigma Winery Open to All Summit Attendees 11:30 A.M., Wednesday, January 14, 2009 Mr. Kaj Ahlmann Keynote: “Six Sigma and Wine: Art or Science?” […]

iSixSigma Live! has announced the finalists for the awards that will be given at the Miami Summit in January. The top three finalists for the award, Most Successful Lean Six Sigma Start-up Program, are: Betfair, NewPage Corp., and Unlimited Technology Inc. Finalists for the award, Most Successful Re-energized Lean Six Sigma Program, are: United Services […]

I used to work in the IT business and we were always on the look-out for the next “big thing” to cash in on. It was things like moving from mainframes to open systems and onto Microsoft Windows, relational databases, business intelligence systems, OLAP reporting and CRM systems. Sowhile I was travelling home from Sydney […]

I’ve spent a good part of this past summer travelling for business. In the past, I might have flown a few times a year for conferences, but this year I’ve earned quite a few “miles,” Now, I know that some of you are already experienced Road Warriors, and you are probably already laughing at me, […]

Webster’s defines delight as “extreme satisfaction.” It is what gets your customers to say WOW!

You invest 4 months of your life. You work in close co-operation with the operational teams. You gain buy-in and agreement on an innovative solution to enhance business performance. You build sustainability into the solution. You identify clear benefits in terms of financial, process, people and customer. It’s a text-book project. So return in 6 […]

  The Best Places to Work Competition has wrapped up and the top ten finalists have emerged. Now we’re not going to tell you where the No. 1 place for Six Sigma professionals to work is yet… or what the order of the top ten is…. We’re saving that for the awards ceremony in January. […]

Winning isn’t everything; in fact, many times a “win” is in finishing the race or improving the score, whether that means fewer defects, decreased cycle time and/or improved customer satisfaction. But there are times when a win is a win and calls for more attention than is usually given to the everyday job well done. […]

When I started in continuous improvement (CI) four years ago it was via the traditional Six Sigma DMAIC route. I was indoctrinated into the Six Sigma world and have earned my ASQ CSSBB and can do impressive stuff with statistics. Lean was not even on the radar for me, it was just another approach that […]

Lincoln Electric, a world leader in the design, development and manufacture of welding equipment, improves operational efficiency through Six Sigma AND fosters innovation at the same time. Looks like we’ve got some benchmarking to do. “In the last three years, Chairman, President and CEO John M. Stropki has led his team through eight acquisitions and […]