When Six Sigma and other Improvements Come from the Leadership
Posted by: meikah | 25 August 2008 | 8:44 pm
Inspired by Six Sigma and Toyota model of management, Windber Medical Center President F. Nicholas Jacobs has mandated quality healthcare.
One good thing about this is that the Johnstown, PA government is also helping out the healthcare industry in the area by launching a three-pronged approach to improve quality in healthcare:
- Pushing quality through public reporting.
- Enforcing quality through the False Claims Act.
- Incentivizing quality through payment reform.
Supplementing this approach is the “pay for performance” for physicians and hospitals. In other word, the government will be rewarding people for good performance. Read more…
In a related story, because of what Mr. Jacobs did, he was credited for being innovative. Here are a list of improvements that he has done:
- Expanded emergency and obstetrics departments
- Construction of “the ultimate education center”
- Transforming the small town hospital into a showcase of state-of-the-art medicine and holistic alternatives
- Extensive training for medical practitioners
- Focus on patient control and preventive medicine
When improvement comes from leadership, a lot can be achieved.
Source:
The Tribune-Democrat
Filed under: Benefits and Savings, Deployment, Healthcare, Innovation, Quality, Six Sigma
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Another Quality Quiz from PQ Systems eLine
Posted by: meikah | 13 August 2008 | 8:03 pm
PQ Systems through it’s Quality eline newsletter brings us another quality quiz.
For this month, you will get a chance to win a copy of the popular Quality Gamebox program. Submit your response by August 29 to be entered in the drawing.
Check out the Quality Quiz now!
Filed under: Quality, PQ Systems eLine
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Ford Continues with Six Sigma
Posted by: meikah | 12 August 2008 | 10:34 pm
Despite economic crisis and dwindling sales, Ford Motor Co.’s VP for Global Quality, Bennie Fowler says, “we’re playing to win!”
How? By increasing their efforts on quality improvements.
Fowler said Ford was aiming for an average of 800 errors per 1,000 vehicles among its small cars launched in Europe, a rate better than Toyota’s in that class and 500 less than the industry average.
Fowler said each U.S. Ford plant will send 5 to 10 hourly workers to Wayne State University this fall to train for Six Sigma black belt certification.
In another story on Motor Trends, Ford plans to be global quality leader by 2010.
… to boost accountability, the automaker is implementing an intricate Early Claims Binning system that will help track quality issues straight to the source. Warranty claims are quickly sent to a car’s original assembly plant, where the problem is analyzed to see whether its cause is a manufacturing flaw or a problem with the overall design.
In addition Fowler says Dearborn is training an “army of problem solvers” throughout the company, using the Six Sigma management strategy originally pioneered by Motorola to improve quality. The automaker currently has 60,000 Six Sigma “green belts,” more than 7000 “black belts,” and 400 “master black belts working around the world,” and will also offer a course this fall through Wayne State University to help UAW workers get certified for Six Sigma black belt status.
If you see a company embarking on efforts like these, it’s hard not to take notice and give support. Way to go, Ford!
Filed under: Benefits and Savings, Manufacturing, Six Sigma Organizations, Training, Black Belt, Quality, Six Sigma, Ford Motor Co.
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Happy 4th of July!
Posted by: meikah | 4 July 2008 | 2:36 am
The Fourth of July is one of the biggest and most meaningful celebrations in the U.S.
Here in the Philippines, this used to be a red-letter day, too, until President Diosdado Macapagal moved the Independence Day celebration to June 12 in the name of nationalism.
Still July 4th remains to be a Fil-American Friendship Day, which celebrates the start of a good friendship between the two countries.
In the spirit of friendship then, let me share some quality-4th-of-July links:
Filed under: Events/Announcements, Quality
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Applying Six Sigma to Motion-Control Processes
Posted by: meikah | 22 June 2008 | 9:44 pm
I stumbled upon a good discussion about how to improve quality in motion control prcesses. Motion plays an important role in any organization, but motion control is used in the packaging, printing, textile, semiconductor production, and assembly industries.
Thus, if you’re business is involved in those mentioned above, motion control is important to you, and ensuring quality in these processes is crucial in your operations.
Over at heyicnc, Kevin Frantz, Six Sigma leader at GE Fanuc Automation, shares how Six Sigma can ensure quality in motion-control processes. Mr. Frantz says:
Your first task in applying Six Sigma to a motion-control process is to understand its purpose, which is always to optimize quality and throughput.
Six Sigma is a tool that can unveil subtle problems that plague all processes, silently stealing productivity and quality. Like all processes, motion-control applications are not immune to production downtime and quality control issues. Slow machine set ups, product positioning problems, equipment failures, out-of-spec parts can all contribute to the problem.
You may not know the exact cause, but you can see the negative results: low production counts, lackluster quality, customer rejection, and lost money. Six Sigma could be the solution to those problems.
*Photo from Stock.Xchng
Filed under: Tools/Toolkits, Manufacturing, Processes, Semiconductors, Quality, Six Sigma
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How is Your Quality?
Posted by: meikah | 11 June 2008 | 8:30 pm
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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Six Sigma Practitioner Turns a Negative Incident Into a Positive One
Posted by: meikah | 31 March 2008 | 9:19 pm
Saeukkang, in Korean means fish crackers, has been loved by the Korean public for 40 years. Recently, however, a customer found a rat’s head inside a noraebang saeukkang, the jumbo-sized version of saeukkang.
The incident occurred just two months after Sun Wook, chairman of Nongshim, took his post. But instead of taking the incident as an assault to the company, Sun Wook took it as an opportunity to make the food company even better.
In an interview with Moon Byung-joo JoongAng Ilbo for Inside JoongAngDaily, Sun Wook says:
I will tell the public more when a complete investigation into the matter is finished. I do believe that there is something that is very wrong with the overall system, and by October, I will weed out these problems one by one. Through Six Sigma, we will lower the inferior goods rate from one in 1 million to one in 10 million.
Sun’s career began in 1975 at Samsung. He became head of Samsung SDI in 2005, and was the first person in Korea to adopt Six Sigma practices.
His being a Six Sigma practitioner and believer may just be the reason for his positive view of an otherwise negative incident.
Related story:
S. Korea: Rats head leads to cracker recall
Filed under: Six Sigma Organizations, Processes, Quality, Six Sigma, Food
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Dr. Joseph M. Juran passes away…
Posted by: meikah | 2 March 2008 | 11:31 pm
… and SixSig condoles with his family and relatives. May he rest in peace.
Although we can say that Dr. Juran has left quite a substantial Quality books, training modules, and lots of insights, he will be sorely missed by the quality community.
Source:
iSixSigma News
Filed under: General, Quality, Joseph M. Juran
2 Comments |
From the Practitioners’ Mouth Comes Lean News on Healthcare
Posted by: meikah | 17 December 2007 | 7:55 pm
A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon a good resource on Lean, Lean Six Sigma, or Six Sigma being implemented in healthcare.
The blog titled Lean Healthcare Exchange is a forum for leaders in Lean Healthcare, Healthcare Quality, Lean Six Sigma. These people exchange ideas and share their lessons to everyone. What’s good about this site is that the posts are real-life issues besetting the healthcare industry.
It has run the whole gamut of taking the cudgels of leadership in healthcare, to the right tools for the job, to problem solving. It’s a wealth of information on the Web.
Check out the blog!
*Photo from MorgueFile
Filed under: Lean Six Sigma, Deployment, Six Sigma References, Healthcare, Quality
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Six Sigma and TQM
Posted by: meikah | 21 November 2007 | 11:41 pm
Long before Six Sigma, there was Total Quality Management or TQM that was the panacea for ailing companies.
The TQM approach started in the 1950’s and became popular in the 1980’s. TQM is a philosophy that makes quality the driving force behind leadership, design, planning, and improvement initiatives. This philosophy is governed by eight elements: ethics, integrity, trust, training, teamwork, leadership, recognition, communication. Read more…
Six Sigma on the other hand, is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving towards six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process — from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service. Read more…
How do they differ then?
BusinessKnowledgeSource.com puts the two side by side and highlights the following differences:
- TQM helps improve quality but it often reaches a stage where no further quality improvements can be made. Six sigma focuses on taking quality improvement processes to the next level.
- TQM views quality as conformance to internal requirements. Six Sigma focuses on improving quality by reducing the number of defects.
- Six Sigma helps numerous organizations because it reduces the operational costs by focusing on reducing the number of defects that are produced, reducing the cycle time, and cost savings.
- Six Sigma focuses on cost cutting measures that can reduce the value and quality and getting rid of costs that have no value to the customer.
- TQM focuses on improving individual operations within unrelated business processes, which means it has a broad view compared to Six Sigma’s narrow view, which focuses on improving all operations in a single business process.
What’s your take on this?
Source:
A Comparison of TQM Versus Six Sigma
