Six Sigma in Europe
Posted by: meikah | 20 August 2010 | 12:22 am
According to an article on the Business Review Europe Online, most successful adopters of Six Sigma are found in Europe.
Among the successful companies are Hertel and GE Healthcare.
According to Ben Doornbusch, Global Business Improvement Manager of Hertel, “The biggest improvement was in the steering of people at our sites. We discovered that there had previously been a lot of loss, with our workforce not being as productive as it could be.”
Mahen Hoolash, Six Sigma Quality Leader, GE Healthcare, says, “Six Sigma taught us that there is a noticeable difference between 99 percent good quality and 99.99966.”
Filed under: GE, Healthcare, Hertel, Six Sigma
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Six Sigma Companies News: GE and its Ecomagination Commitment
Posted by: meikah | 15 June 2009 | 10:29 pm
Here’s another edition of Six Sigma Companies News. Next to improving processes is the initiative of going green. Companies are more and more getting conscious of its carbon emission and the other effects they have on the environment.
GE, truly a pioneering and a Six Sigma advocate at that, is also succeeding in their green initiatives. Recently, the company announced that it has “surpassed its first ecomagination goal to reduce its own greenhouse gas intensity, and is making progress against its other goals for revenue growth, water and technology innovation.”
Reliable Plant reports:
In 2005, GE made a series of ecomagination commitments to be achieved sequentially in the years 2008, 2010 and 2012. The first commitment was to reduce its operational greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity 30 percent in 2008. The company surpassed this goal by reducing GHG intensity 41 percent. Greenhouse gas intensity is the ratio of greenhouse gas emissions to Company revenue. GE also has reduced its absolute GHG emissions 13 percent and improved its energy efficiency 37 percent since 2005, keeping on track to meet its 2012 operational commitments in these areas.
With the release of the 2008 ecomagination annual report, GE also announced that it increased its portfolio of ecomagination products and services by one-third, to 80; grew revenues of ecomagination offerings 21 percent, to $17 billion; and increased its investment in the research and development of clean tech solutions 27 percent, to $1.4 billion.
Filed under: Environment, GE, Six Sigma Organizations
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Findng the Green in Lean Six Sigma Programs
Posted by: meikah | 7 June 2009 | 9:00 pm
Chris Green mentions two companies and their lean environmental program. First is GE, and second is 3M.
With GE, the lean environmental program involves promising to maintain its 2004, if not reduce, greenhouse gases (GHG) emission. The company did this by engine balancing.
With 3M’s program, the company launched the Environmental, Health and Safety Operations (EHS). EHS Lean Six Sigma projects have focused on topics ranging from compliance or due diligence activities to data collection and management to communications.
The initiatives of the two companies will surely inspire all the others. They also show that Lean Six Sigma can help in green initiatives.
Read the article HERE.
Filed under: 3M, GE, Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma, Six Sigma Organizations
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GE Pushes for Lean Manufacturing
Posted by: meikah | 24 May 2009 | 8:45 pm
Quality people are now looking at Lean manufacturing as one of the strategies that can help manufacturers ride the current storm.
An article on Charleston Business Journal says that American manufacturers can compete with cheaper and sometimes faster foreign companies.
Dan McDonnell, manager of GE’s lean initiative in the company’s transportation division, says, ““We absolutely can compete. It doesn’t matter that they have an unfair advantage. I really believe that lean is North America’s bridge to the future.
As an example of the value of lean manufacturing, McDonnell showed a piston pin created for locomotives built by GE’s transportation division.
Producing the pin before lean manufacturing costs the company $107 per pin. The best quote for the same pin from China was $59. After implementing “kaizen†— a waste-reduction, continuous improvement philosophy that’s the foundation for lean manufacturing — GE produced the pin for $69.
Filed under: GE, Lean, Lean Manufacturing, Manufacturing, Six Sigma, Six Sigma Organizations
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Six Sigma Companies News: G.E.’s Stocks Standing
Posted by: meikah | 28 April 2009 | 8:56 pm
Here’s another edition of Six Sigma Companies News. G.E. pioneers quality initiatives like Six Sigma. When the economic crisis hit, it didn’t spare even the big Six Sigma companies.
G.E. stocks, for one, is among those that got affected among other aspects of its business. Chicago Tribune features G.E. in its Q&A with readers.
Q: I would like information on General Electric Co. I bought some of its shares for my grandson. E.P., via the Internet
A: The giant conglomerate became famous for its efficiency and management through programs such as Six Sigma and its leadership in the fields in which it chose to compete.
It is still respected for those strengths. Furthermore, its industrial and consumer goods should benefit from the $2 trillion in stimulus programs initiated by governments around the world, though most financial benefits won’t begin until next year.
Filed under: GE, Six Sigma, Six Sigma Organizations, Stock Market
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GE Power Systems Uses Six Sigma
Posted by: meikah | 20 November 2008 | 7:01 pm
FinChannel reports that GE Power Systems is developing a CSAs (Contractual Service Agreements) that will focus on steam turbines for all its facilities worldwide. The initiative will also include steam turbine in operations for nuclear facilities.
The steam turbine is designed to lower the cost of operating a power plant.
What’s noteworthy of this initiative is that GE Power is using Six Sigma for this.
The development effort for the steam turbine CSAs has involved various business units throughout GE Power Systems. Using rigorous Six Sigma quality processes, the development team performed an extensive statistical analysis to create a modeling tool allowing for a set of detailed recommendations regarding time between outages, scope of work required at each outage and parts replacement intervals.
“The result is an easy-to-use steam turbine CSA model,” said Michael Kalmes, general manager of GE Power Systems’ Contractual Services business.
Filed under: GE, GE Power Systems, Six Sigma, Six Sigma Organizations
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Six Sigma in Best Practices
Posted by: meikah | 12 November 2008 | 9:56 pm
A new best practice report by APQC and Ernst & Young reveals how successful organizations put process measures and analytics to effective use. It proves that the sustained and effective use of process measures and analytics is increasingly a key differentiator separating leading organizations from the rest of the pack.
Two Six Sigma companies were part of the study:
Caterpillar Financial Services: At Caterpillar, process owners, managers, continuous improvement consultants, and Six Sigma Black Belts all work together to identify, measure, and act on process measures and analytics. The measures are tied directly to the organization’s critical success factors and customer/stakeholder requirements.
GE Global Business Services: At GE, the CEO initiated the drive for integrated measures and analytics. Given GE’s background as a Six Sigma leader, he was surprised that the organization had not institutionalized strong process-based measures. The shared services organization was tapped to set an example for the entire business. With a CEO mandate in hand, GE Global Business Services leveraged a process framework and Six Sigma skills by linking process owners, product-line leaders, and quality/Six Sigma experts to establish global performance measures. GE’s leader mandate and collaborative approach has stimulated cooperation and enabled the organization to demonstrate value across the business.
Filed under: Best Practices, Caterpillar Inc., GE, Six Sigma, Six Sigma Organizations
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Doesn’t Six Sigma Work for the Movies and TV Shows?
Posted by: meikah | 10 August 2008 | 11:50 pm
GE owns NBC. That’s a fact. NBC not profitting as according to GE’s expectations. That’s a conjecture.
But rumors have it that GE is actually thinking of selling NBC because of the latter’s disappointing performance in the ratings and profits game. CEO Jeff Immelt says otherwise, and insists that GE is not selling NBC.
I was especially struck at this phrase (in bold font) on BusinessWorld Online‘s article:
The media unit is plainly out of place in the massive conglomerate, for which in 2007 it provided just under 9% of revenue. While in ’07 NBC’s profit margins topped all GE segments, its revenue growth lagged that of the overall company in ’06 and ’07 and slowed to 0.1% in the first half of 2008. And no one today forecasts stability for big media companies.
The stock price of GE has more or less stagnated since CEO Jeff Immelt took over in 2001, in part because the notion of bona fide multi-industry titans like GE is considered passe. (Even media conglomerates are now passe.) And the governing narrative of GE is hard to extend to NBC. A key tenet of GE exceptionalism holds that it adds value to anything it touches by obsessing over management and management processes like Six Sigma. But that which debugs, say, making turbines simply won’t work for the woolly and unstandardizable ways in which movies and TV shows are made.
That made me ask: doesn’t Six Sigma work for the movies and TV shows?
Somehow, I’m having a hard time reconciling that. Six Sigma might or should work for these industries, too.
Filed under: GE, NBC, Services, Six Sigma, Six Sigma Organizations
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GE: From Six Sigma to Lean Six Sigma
Posted by: meikah | 20 July 2008 | 9:10 pm
At GE, at the helm of their Six Sigma initiative is their CIO, Gary Reiner. Since GE’s massive Six Sigma initiative in 1996, Mr. Reiner has been at the forefront of GE’s Six Sigma deployment, and oversees the company’s $55 billion of annual sourcing.
The company started with Six Sigma, and it’s interesting to know that GE’s Six Sigma has morphed into Lean Six Sigma. In an interview with Geoff Colvin, senior editor at large for Fortune Magazine, Reiner shares some of his thoughts and plans for the Lean Six Sigma initiative at GE.
Here are some snippets.
What does Jeff Immelt want from you?
Three things. My responsibilities are information technology, Lean Six Sigma, and sourcing.You’ve been in charge of GE’s Six Sigma initiative since it started, in 1996. Are you still getting value out of it?
We’ve been aggressively trying to migrate away from talking about tools and instead to talking about outcomes. Six Sigma is a tool. It is a wonderful tool, but it is a tool. What we’re talking more about as a company is outcomes, and the two outcomes we really want are product reliability and customer responsiveness.So we start with that and work our way back to what tools are needed to make that happen. For product reliability, the Six Sigma tools are sensational. On the responsiveness side, it’s often less about using Six Sigma and more about getting the right people in the room to map out how long it takes for us to do something in front of customers and, using mostly common sense, take out those things that get in the way of meeting our customer needs responsibly.
For example?
In our GE Money business we offer private-label finance to retailers. We are the financing behind jewelry stores and pharmacies and the like. Sad to say, it was taking 63 days from when a retailer contacted us saying it wanted to consider using us as a private-label financier until it could conduct the first transaction with our financing. No one had calculated this before we went on this journey.We did a number of what we call lean workouts, where we get everybody in the room to map out the process, and they got it down from 63 days to one day. The leader of that business was able to go out and have as his marketing campaign, “Enroll today. Transact tomorrow.” When we did that, sales doubled. And there are 30 examples of that throughout the company.
No wonder GE has been successful in their Six Sigma initiatives. They have understood the role of Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma, which is a tool, in their process improvement, and work around that premise. They have a goal, which is product reliability and customer responsiveness, and they have focused their Six Sigma initiative with that end goal in mind.
It’s always about a goal and a focus.
Update:
GE: The Heat on Immelt
Filed under: Deployment, GE, Lean Six Sigma, Manufacturing, Six Sigma, Six Sigma Organizations, Technology
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Where is Six Sigma?
Posted by: meikah | 23 July 2007 | 8:58 pm
The New York Times Your Money section features how GE is going through some rough times financially. The company has not been able to get their stocks moving to a significant high. It even had to write off $3 billion in reinsurance, sell stuff, buy things, and the earnings growth rate has not reached the targeted 15 percent.
GE is one of the big companies that has been associated with Six Sigma. For years, it has boasted of savings and benefits brought about by its Six Sigma strategy. Other companies even look up to GE. But with what’s happening at the company right now, I’m sure it has raised a lot of questions such as:
- Where does Six Sigma figure in all this?
- At what point did Six Sigma fail the company? Or did it?
- Can Six Sigma help improve GE’s bottomline?
- Can Six Sigma save GE?
- To be successful in all aspects of business, does a company need more than Six Sigma methods?
Does anyone have the answers?
*Photo from the NYTimes article
