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.

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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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Genpact Attributes Q2 250% Up in Income to Six Sigma

Indianinfoline reports:

Genpact Limited, second quarter 2008 revenues were US$253.6mn, up 26% from the second quarter of 2007. Net income was US$24.8mn, up 250% from US$7.1mn in the second quarter of 2007; net income margin for the second quarter of 2008 was 9.8%, up from 3.5% in the second quarter of 2007.

Further, Pramod Bhasin, Genpact’s President and CEO said:

“Our excellent second quarter results continue our track record of strong growth and delivering on our commitments. Given our results to date and our expectations for the remainder of the year, we are increasing our full year revenue guidance and our guidance on adjusted income from operations margin.

We expect revenues for the full year to grow organically by 26-28% from US$823mn in 2007. As a result of increased internal efficiencies, a shift towards higher value work and improved pricing for the value we deliver, we now expect our adjusted income from operations margin to improve by 80 to 100 basis points to between 17.1% and 17.3% in 2008 from 16.3% in 2007.

Genpact’s Six Sigma, process and technology expertise are driving market penetration and sustainable, superior growth as we create value for our clients and all our key stakeholders.�

Read more…

Filed under: Benefits and Savings, Services, Six Sigma

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Using Six Sigma and Lean in Improving Performance in Practice

Take a look at the automotive industry and healthcare industry. Do you see any similarities?

By its name alone, the automotive industry is concerned with the design and manufacture of motor vehicles, while the healthcare industry is concerned with people’s health. The details of each industry’s processes may be different but improving these processes can be done using the same methodology.

This is proven by Automotive Industry Action Group and Michigan Medical Group Management Association.

They launched a program called Improving Performance in Practice, or IPIP.

“What was demonstrated without a doubt is you could put an automotive quality coach in a medical setting and have a positive outcome,” said Rose Steiner, state director of Michigan IPIP for the AIAG.

The results so far: increased patient satisfaction and a much smoother flow of processes.

To improve further, IPIP will also use Six Sigma and lean systems philosophies, and look for efficiencies throughout the entire practice.

Read more…

Source:
MLive.com a featured link of iSixSigma

Filed under: Manufacturing, Services, Healthcare, Processes, Lean, Six Sigma, Automotive

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Lean Six Sigma Improves Security Clearance Processes

According to FCW.com:

A governmentwide plan to overhaul the security clearance process and introduce more automation will soon be headed for White House consideration, according to leaders of an interagency team that is crafting the proposal.

For this purpose, a Joint Security Clearance Process Reform Team is formed. This team now will use Lean Six Sigma to achieve its goal, which is to reduce the time for employees to get or process their clearance.

Currently, employess get cleared in 120 days. But the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 require faster clearances. Thus, the goal of the team now is to process security clearances within 60 days. The whole team hopes that by December 2009, security clearances should be completed in 60 days.

Such an improvement requires a complete overhaul of the clearance process, and Lean Six Sigma fits the bill. How they plan to do this, read: Clearance process gets makeover.

Governments, whether in the US or overseas, are famous for their beauracratic red tapes. I wish the Philippine government would discover Lean or Six Sigma, too.

Filed under: Services, Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma Organizations, Public Sector, Processes, Six Sigma

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Neville Clarke Philippines Offers New Six Sigma Trainings

Pera Neville Clarke is an international consultancy firm specializing in providing consultancy and training services in Lean, Six Sigma, Quality Management, Environmental Management, Safety Management, Business Process Improvement and Business Planning.

Neville Clarke-Philippines is offering the following Six Sigma Trainings:

For more information, check out Neville Clarke Philippines Courselist.

Filed under: Services, Training, Neville Clarke, Six Sigma

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Hattiesburg, Missouri Adopts Lean Six Sigma

The list of governments going into Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma is getting longer. My previous posts had featured Erie County, City of Fort Wayne in Indiana, and Iowa. These governments have implemented Six Sigma and Lean to improve operations and ultimately their service to their people.

Hattiesburg, Forrest County in Mississippi is another city that is adopting Lean Six Sigma for the same reason. According to the news article on the city’s website, HattiesburgAmerican.com, city officials have said that their program will focus on key principles known as DMAIC: Define opportunities, measure performance, analyze opportunity, improve performance and control performance.

Already, under this program, the city has selected city employees, Julia Lowe, an Urban Development accountant, and Maj. Billy Lane with the police department to attend Lean Six Sigma training classes.

Common notion has it that public service sucks. But with these cities taking the lead in changing that reputation, I’m sure in time, excellent public service will be achieved and sustained.

Source:
hattiesburgamerican.com, City adopts Lean Six Sigma

Filed under: Services, Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma Organizations, Public Sector, DMAIC, Six Sigma

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Six Sigma Improves Hospital Processes

I went to Makati Medical Center last week to visit a friend. Normally, I would take the stairs for lower floors, but since his room was on the 7th floor, I decided to take the elevators. But boy, the elevator lines were long and slow! There were only three working elevators, and this was one of the premier hospitals in the country!

Not wanting to waste my lunchbreak, I found myself taking the stairs after all. Good thing, his wife sent me a text message to meet me instead at the Floating Restaurant for lunch. Three floors up would do me good, too.

I believe good working elevators are a must for hospitals. Definitely, among other processes at Makati Med, their elevators need improvement. Maybe, they’d like to have a try at Six Sigma, which could improve hospital processes as shown in the American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) study.

The study shows that performance improvement practices such as Six Sigma might help hospitals decrease in-patient mortality, length of hospital stay, and healthcare costs. Click here to read how Six Sigma helps in patient care.

Source:
Quality Digest, a featured link of Six Sigma Zone

*Photo from Stock.Xchng

Filed under: Services, Healthcare, Processes, Six Sigma Zone, Quality Digest, Six Sigma

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Santa Claus Uses Six Sigma for the Christmas Rush

It’s that time of year again when Santa Claus, the famous CEO of Polar Enterprises, Inc., is on top of what he likes doing best: producing toys and giving them to every child in the world.

With a worldwide customer base, which is increasing by the second, you would wonder how Santa does it without a snag.

I stumbled upon an interesting interview with Santa Claus by e-Zsigma newsletter’s Six Sigma Spotlight. Below are the highlights of the interview:

1. Incorporating Six Sigma with Lean Manufacturing, and leveraging Senior Santa’s Helpers (aka Black Belts), toy production efficiencies at Santa’s company were up by 5%.
2. Deployment and practice of Six Sigma - the entire system of toy production is dynamic and so they used modeling and experimental design and ended up with an optimized routing and delivery process. This has saved us a considerable amount of time… “I am home quicker for Mrs. Claus, and I even get to stop for my favorite post-delivery beverage… A Grandé Hot Chocolate at Starbucks… with lots of whipped cream!”
3. Despite the magnitude of toy deliveries that needed to be done, at Santa’s Workshop, the so-called “last minute” rush is nonexistent. “Our deployment strategy for Six Sigma included a comprehensive assessment of our core business processes, using such tools as SIPOC, Process and Value Stream Mapping, Root Cause Analysis, and much more to identify the key processes and more importantly, the key variables affecting the capabilities and outcomes of each of these processes. Statistical analysis played an important role at the task level of the processes, so we could really analyze variation and capability. We then tied the outputs of these processes directly to our 6 billion plus customers, and using something I think they called Quality Function Deployment and House of Quality, we were able to align and quantify all of what we were doing with those outputs or deliverables. Our Senior Santa’s Helpers were trained in basic as well as advanced tools, including statistics, and were assigned specific projects aligned with our deployment and business strategy that would maximize the benefits to operations and solve many of the recurring problems we had been struggling with.”

Click here to read the interview.

*Photo from MorgueFile

Filed under: Manufacturing, Services, Lean Six Sigma, Events/Announcements, Six Sigma, Christmas

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Herman Hurwitz, Your Friendly Neighborhood Six Sigma Physician

Wouldn’t it be music to your ears if you knew that you had a friendly neighborhood Six Sigma Physician? You bet!

Well, if you are near any one of those Quest Diagnostics Inc. labs, then you can sleep well at night because you have actually a Six Sigma physician in the person of Herman Hurwitz. What does he do?

Dr. Hurwitz makes sure that you get your laboratory results fast and reliable. His goal is for the 300 technicians and 17 physicians on his staff to turn around routine lab work overnight and have results back to doctors by 6:30 a.m. They process about 25,000 test orders a day.

Quest Diagnostics has been following Six Sigma management doctrine for seven years to reduce errors and improve efficiency. “Do we make errors? Yes, of course we do,” Hurwitz said. “But when we do, we find out why and we fix it.”

On the efficiency side, the lab questions every step its technicians take to accomplish a task - literally. “We look at something as simple as a technologist walking around the counter,” he said. “Do they really have to walk around the counter?”

Continue reading…

This is the value of incorporating Six Sigma into your processes. You know exactly what to do and how to achieve results.

Source:
Philly.com a Six Sigma Zone featured link

Filed under: Services, Deployment, Healthcare, Six Sigma

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A Six Sigma in Your Shopping Experience

It’s the time of year again of cheer and giving: Christmas. So what do people do? They either rush to the stores and shop or sit in their comfortable chairs, turn on their PC and click-shop away.

With the former, shoppers only need to survive traffic (especially for the last-minute shoppers), crowded shops, and long queues. When management see these, they can always create reroutes or detours to eas up traffic, open more counters. In other words, the action can be immediate.

It’s different though with online shopping experience. Shoppers will have to deal with downtime, erroneous checkouts, or order status is unavailable. The statistics of online shoppers is growing and perhaps it’s good to look at it with Six Sigma eyes.

Over at iSixSigma, I found two interesting articles on how Six Sigma can be applied to your online shopping experience. The first article touches on the growing figures of online shopping and how was it so far. The second article details the metrics and Six Sigma levels for online shopping. Check them out:

Online Holiday Shopping at 2 Sigma
Metrics and Sigma Levels for Online Shopping

Here’s wishing everyone a holiday shopping experience at 6 Sigma!

*Photo from Stock.Xchng

Filed under: Services, Sales, iSixSigma, Technology, Internet

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