How is Your Quality?

When we talk about Six Sigma or Lean, we also talk about quality. After all, it’s quality of our processes that we’re trying to continually improve.

So, how well do we know quality? or How well do we know how to read and interpret data, and associate it with quality?

PQ Systems eLine has an interesting quality quiz made by Professor Cleary. Take the quiz now!

Here’s also a more complete video explanation.

Filed under: Data, Data Analysis, Quality, PQ Systems eLine

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IT Data for Six Sigma

Dealing with data is part and parcel of any operation. But how to treat the data in your hands is another question. That is the usual dilemma that CIOs and senior IT team leaders face.

What’s ironic even, is that CIOs and senior IT team leaders often find themselves handling a lot of data, yet they seldom treat these information as something that can help them optimize their organizations effectively. That is because they don’t have the tools that help them sift through and find the relevant data. This is where Six Sigma comes in.

Thus, in the recent Six Sigma in IT conference, this question was asked: “What should we be measuring for our IT organization?”

To know the answers, read IT Measures That Matter.

Source:
Information Week

*Photo from Stock.Xchng

Filed under: Software/Technology, Data, Data Analysis, Six Sigma, IT, Data Quality, Metrics

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Six Sigma and Tennis

If there’s one sport that I wanted to learn, it’s tennis. It’s not that there was never an opportunity to learn the sport because for one, my childhood friend’s family was then running a tennis court business. We would often go to their house and play, but not tennis though. Like most little girls, we were addicted to dolls.

I know it’s not too late to learn it. Meanwhile, I content myself with watching tennis live or on TV and see my favorite players execute their almost perfect moves and frustrating unforced errors.

Speaking of unforced errors, I stumbled upon an article on USAToday.com that somehow links Six Sigma with unforced errors in tennis. Of course, we all know that errors of any kind is really detrimental to any kind o f endeavor.

The article, written in 2004, narrates that during a tennis tournament, when players reach the finals, their unforced errors diminish. The winners are those who have the least unforced errors.

Relating tennis to business, any unforced error in transaction is bad for business. This is where Six Sigma comes. After all, Six Sigma is a methodology that help companies examine every little detail in how things are done in order to figure out how to reduce errors to near zero.

Read the article.

I’m enjoying right now the Australian Open, and rooting for Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova.

Update:
Roger Federer gave way to Tennis’s rising star Novak Dyokovic, and Maria Sharapova went on to win her first Australian Open.

*Photo from MorgueFile

Filed under: Data Analysis, Zero Defects, Six Sigma, Sports

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Alarming Figures that will Need Six Sigma

An article on New York Times about a month ago boasted of a 65% decrease in fatal airplane crashes. It’s deemed as the golden age of safety, the safest period, in the safest mode, in the history of the world.
Should we be happy about this? Look at the following figures:

1. In 1996, two (2) infamous crashes that together killed 375 people.
2. The rate dropped by about 65% to 1 fatal accident in about 4.5M departures, from 1 in nearly 2M in 1997.
3. Around the world, there have been 7 crashes this year that killed more than 20 people each.
4. The Flight Safety Foundation recently calculated that if the 1996 accident rate had remained the same in 2006, there would have been 30 major accidents last year. Instead, there were 11.

There are however sustained efforts to address the problem.

• improving equipment, like cockpit instruments that help planes steer clear of mountains when visibility is poor, and reliable jet engines
• conducting “unstabilized approaches,” meaning pilots had to fiddle with flaps, throttle and other controls just before landing
• developing better guidance for pilots to follow flight paths precisely and stay farther away from mountains in the area
• better signs on taxiways to prevent planes from moving into the path of other aircraft

Policy initiatives:

• acquire new planes
• more “safety summits”
• a national commission on aviation safety and security led by VP Al Gore in 1997

The trend to watch out for: air and runway traffic will double by 2025

Source:
Fatal Airplane Crashes Drop 65%

*Photo from Stock.Xchng

Filed under: Data, Data Analysis, Aviation

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Six Sigma DMAIC and Business Strategy

Yes, you read it right. The DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) roadmap can help organizations plot out their business strategy.

Chris Jordan, writing for iSixSigma, has a good discussion on how to use DMAIC to create a sound business strategy.

Define stage sets the blueprint for the strategy. Executives define the current status of the company and how it is presently operating as well as the current market or economic situation. Companies can make use of many business improvement and strategy tools to help define its current position.

Measure phase confirms the current baseline operation. During this stage, data is gathered to show how the company is tracking.

Analyze phase helps the company do a careful analysis of the business and the market. Opportunities, threats, strengths and weaknesses, which are validated with data from the measure stage, are analyzed in detail. The data is used to help root cause investigation of gaps in performance, competitor strategy, product cycle stage and positioning and market growth.

Improve phase follows by using the information from the Define, Measure and Analyze phases. At this point, it should already be clear what areas of the business need to improve.

At the Control phase, teams closely monitor and manage company performance against strategy. This is to ensure the company follows the path that leadership wants to take. More importantly, the executive team sets a time schedule to meet as a team to review and reassess the business strategy.

Read more…

Source:
iSixSigma Library

*Photo from Stock.Xchng

Filed under: Six Sigma Organizations, Training, Team Dynamics, Deployment, Processes, Data Analysis, DMAIC

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