Doesn’t Six Sigma Work for the Movies and TV Shows?

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.

Read more…

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.

*Photo credit

Filed under: Services, Six Sigma Organizations, GE, Six Sigma, NBC

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GE: From Six Sigma to Lean Six Sigma

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.

Read more…

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

*Photo credit

Filed under: Manufacturing, Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma Organizations, Deployment, GE, Technology, Six Sigma

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Where is Six Sigma?

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

Filed under: General, Six Sigma Organizations, Finance, Sustainable Business, GE, GE Money

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How GE Uses Six Sigma to Drive Security ROI

That’s the title of the article on CIO. Francis X. Taylor, General Electric’s (GE) chief security officer, explains how to apply process imrovement methods to manage security risks.

Taylor was speaking before an audience of security executives at the CSO Perspectives in March.  Here are excerpts of insights from him.

A methodology like Six Sigma requires a change in how you think about your organization and how it works. It requires shifting loyalties from how your organization operates to how those operations affect customers—the people and organizations who determine the value of what you produce. Performing well in this task adds value to your organization, can help security executives anticipate risks and identify resources to mitigate them, and it enables your leadership to pursue new opportunities for growth.

Taylor then presented process gains in policy violations at , background checks, and security alarms. He improved these processes These are real-life experiences when he was still working at the State Department.

The processes are improved through analysis and knowing what each process involves. The lesson learned is that one only needs to know the processes, gather relevant data, and work toward making the processes work more efficiently. Read more…

Source:
CIO, a Six Sigma Zone featured link
 

Filed under: Benefits and Savings, Deployment, Public Sector, CIO, GE, Data Analysis, Six Sigma Zone

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Innovation of the Week: LightSpeed from GE Medical Systems

As a Six Sigma organization, trust GE and its subsidiaries to come up with innovative products.

LightSpeed is a CT scanner that captures multiple images of a patient’s anatomy simultaneously, at a speed six times faster than traditional “single-slice” scanners. It doubles doctor productivity, and enables doctors to more accurately diagnose and treat patients and to make decisions with greater confidence in life-or-death situations. Orders for the system came in at a rate six times faster than any product GE Medical Systems introduced.

And in the true spirit of continuous improvement, GE Medical Systems came up with the LightSpeed VCT XT.

LightSpeed VCT XT is a whole body CT system that excels at cardiac and vascular imaging:

• Up to 70% lower dose without any loss in image quality with SnapShot Pulse.
• Cardiac workflow also improved via a reduction of images to review, process and archive.
• Innovative 80mm of coverage for improved neuro CTA and perfusion with Volume Shuttle.
• All enabled by 40mm V-Res detector and powerful Performix Pro tube/generator.

Sources:
iSixSigma, “ISSSP Session: Innovation and Six Sigma Go Hand in Hand”
GE Healthcare, “New! LightSpeed VCT XT”

Filed under: Manufacturing, Healthcare, Innovation Update, GE

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GE Money and Six Sigma

General Electric, with Jack Welch, and Lean/Six Sigma make a perfect pair as the former strives for perfection and continuous self-improvement, and the latter showing the way how to achieve just that.

The partnership of Lean/Six Sigma, or LSS, and GE has been so good that it is only natural that GE Money, the consumer and small business financial services unit of GE, will also adopt LSS.

CFO.com highlights the benefits of LSS to GE Money, which used it for financial-services operation, such as loan or credit-card application processing. In just three years since GE Money adopted LSS workouts, it was able to do the following:

• In a GE operation in Thailand, where after an LSS workout session, the company was able to cut the processing time for auto loans by 40 percent.
• Reduce the number of fields on an application form for credit cards to make it quicker for the applicant, and work to reduce its application process from 30 days to 2 days.
• Shuffle desks around in the underwriting unit so that there are fewer handoffs.
• More importantly, through LSS workouts, they are able to compile a big dashboard that shows which processes were unnecessary, thereby reducing wastes.

Source:
CFO.com, Six Sigma in Shenzhen

Filed under: Benefits and Savings, Services, Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma Organizations, Finance, Team Dynamics, Deployment, Processes, GE, GE Money

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Innovation of the Week: GE’s Innovation Case Study

In its bid to be continuously improving its processes, GE asked for ideas from students.

GE Healthcare turned to the undergraduate students of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, one of the world’s top design schools, and bid for the development of a product that addresses both ergonomics and emotions.

BusinessWeek Online: Inside Innovation features a synopsis of the the study:

THE RESEARCH
Art Center fielded three teams of eight students. GE Healthcare asked them to address the challenge of expanding health care into rural Africa in 2016. The teams were composed of students majoring in design, transportation, and the environment. All spent the fall semester on the project, and on Dec. 7, Art Center’s “Super Thursday,” they joined other students sponsored by BMW, Honda (HMC ), and Nestlé (NSRGY ) to present their designs.

THE PROTOTYPES
An ultrasound device would wrap like a blanket around a woman’s belly. The design would reduce the training required for technicians. Current machines depend on a skilled technician to guide a probe over the abdomen. The multiple imaging sensors woven into the blanket mean it would simply have to be correctly placed, a big advantage in countries where technicians are in short supply.

A noninvasive malaria scanner would detect disease by looking through the skin of a patient’s hand. Malaria is currently diagnosed with a needle prick and a blood test. That scares some patients away and can delay treatment until results come back from labs. The scanner would be painted in earthy African colors.

Continue reading…

Filed under: Healthcare, Innovation Update, R&D, GE

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