Remember Silicon Valley? When it started to grow sometime in 1971, people were made aware of semiconductors, electronics, and other computer-related industries.
Like all other booming businesses however the Valley at one time also experienced the bust. Although many companies morph into another, some others met their deaths, natural or otherwise.
A few months back, Cito Beltran of Straight Talk on ANC interviewed Diosdado “Dado” Banatao, a Filipino visionary who made it big, and still is big, in Silicon Valley. He founded the semiconductor giant Tallwood Venture Capital. In the years that he had been there, he said that he had developed and sold—though not necessarily in that order as he kept some of them–companies. According to him, the key to making it big there is hard work coupled with skills and knowledge of what you’re doing.
Since the talk was about entrepreneurship, they didn’t touch the subject on process or continuous improvement. A recent article on Electronics Business Online cited four electronic companies affected by the dot-com bust in 2001, but were able to bounce back through Lean Six Sigma.
One of the companies is Xerox, whose Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) played a pivotal role in object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), Ethernet, PostScript, and laser printers in the Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 1980s.
Xerox uses an internal measure called “economic profit,” which is project value minus cost, says Bob Shea, communications manager for corporate Lean Six Sigma. Those internal figures (which Xerox doesn’t release) are then rolled into the company’s overall financial numbers.
“We don’t try to separate out the monetary gain we get with Lean Six, because it’s incorporated into the management process,” says Arthur C. Fornari, vice president and corporate deployment officer for Xerox Lean Six Sigma.
Nevertheless, Lean Six projects have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings, cost avoidance and revenue to Xerox, says Shea.
Continue reading… Lean, mean, Six Sigma machines
Waste and Value: Basic Lean Concepts
In assessing a process, it is important to understand what activities in the process actually add value to the end result. All other activities are wasteful.
That’s right!
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