The Six Sigma Way of Life

Blog tagging is on again. It goes something like this: you will be tagged by another blogger. Once you’re tagged, you will list down 10 things/activities that give you simple pleasure. Then in turn, you will also tag your other blogger-friends. This is like a getting-to-know-you-better type of games online. Of course, the rules of the game may vary. Others require you to list down five blogs and you bump one off by putting in your blog. Then you answer a series of questions.

Anyway, one of my blogger-friends who has been tagged listed down, “living a life of Six Sigma (naks!)”

This struck me. Well, why not? Six Sigma methodology is very practical. We can actually use it in everything we do. After all, Six Sigma is a philosophy. It’s practically a way of life. This led me to search for practical Six Sigma applications in life.

Lee Campe, Six Sigma Master Black Belt who have worked with GE, J&J, JP Morgan Chase, and the Home Depot, showed me the way.

Six Sigma can be applied to your personal life. The Six Sigma diet would be: don’t do anything. Analyze yourself. Collect data about yourself. And statistically prove what’s causing you to be overweight.
Continue reading…

Link: The Six Sigma Way of Life: Analyzing your Weight, Measuring your Success & Using Statistics

Filed under: Tools/Toolkits, Benefits and Savings, Statistics

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Dads as Bosses: Six Sigma Way of Life?

The integration of work and family in the lives of executive men may be one of the most substantial transitions affecting businesses today.

This trend can very well be integrated successfully into any process improvement. Read about it on Global Business Watch.

Filed under: General

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Boeing: Flying with Six Sigma

If you were a businessman you wouldn’t want to see these words on the flight monitor: Flight delayed. My sister-in-law who flew in over the weekend was in a huff when we met her. Her flight was delayed for four hours!

These days, count it as your luckiest day, if you flew and land on time, and with your luggage ready. Back in November 2000, the U.S. Department of Transportation calculated that a quarter of all flights of the 11 largest U.S. carriers arrive more than 15 minutes late. Even after 9-11, The Wall Street Journal reported in March 2002 that the U.S. Department of Transportation still gets 10,000 complaints a year, mostly about airline delays and similar problems.

Flight or airline delays have many causes: bad weather, congested air traffic, engine failure, etc. While the first two reasons are annoying, the third one is both annoying and scary. You wouldn’t want to fly and land somewhere in the jungle or in the deep blue sea.

Going back to my sister-in-law, the incident got me to thinking: Six Sigma will do (a lot of) good to airlines.

I was right. Boeing had used Six Sigma in their problem-solving activities. One of the problems the company had one time was when the recirculating air fans of Boeing 777 were rejected during functional tests on the aircraft production line. This resulted in costly removal, additional testing, and replacement. A Six Sigma team was then put in place. The team used DMAIC to examine data from the fan removals and determine multiple root causes.

The main culprits were Foreign Object Debris (FOD), damaged test tools and internal damage. Six Sigma expert Kent Kuiper however explained, “Identifying “direct causes” such as these wasn’t adequate to fix anything permanently. The team had to dig deeper and find root cause—a key outcome of systematic Six Sigma process application.”

…

Functional-test job work instructions were modified to include a check of the duct system before operating fans as a further preventive measure. And further safety measures are being implemented, such as having installers inform people downstream if they leave an open duct. The same information needed to be shared between shifts.

Read more: Problem-solving approach helps team pinpoint solution.

Filed under: Manufacturing, Six Sigma Organizations

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Six Sigma, BPM, Lean: What’s in a Name?

I made the rounds again of other Six Sigma blogs today. One of the interesting posts is written by Sven Saerens. He was talking about the upcoming Six Sigma 20th anniversary.

Since its beginnings in 1987, Saerens said that Six Sigma has made a quite a name for itself. However, some people still have questions about the methodology: “When is an organization ready to adopt Six Sigma?” In many cases followed by “Or should we do Lean first?” and “What about BPM, are we better of with that?”

Well, I think having questions or even doubts about something is natural—especially that not all those who embraced Six Sigma have been successful. Some of the companies I’ve interviewed actually did Lean or 5S, Kaizen, or ISO before they found their way to Six Sigma. Yet these companies believe that their journey toward process improvement has been helped by each of these quality strategies.

I agree with Saerens’s point about naming your process initiative.

Personally, I think it really doesn’t matter what name an effort goes under. In all methodologies are good tools that can bring a lot of value to any organization, whether it is big or small, in service, transactional or production environments. The best approach for the organization is depending on its level of maturity. Maturity here is not defined in terms of age or magnitude, but in terms of how well the organization knows its customers, their needs and how well the business processes are able to satisfy those. Continue reading…

Filed under: Six Sigma Organizations

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CIGNA at WCBF’s Global Six Sigma Summit

H. Edward Hanway, CIGNA Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Leslie Behnke, CIGNA Vice President of Business Excellence, will be presenting at the WCBF Global Six Sigma Summit, June 28 and 29, 2006 in Las Vegas.

Ms. Behnke will present her Continuous Improvement Tool Kit case study titled “Integrating the Full Range of Six Sigma Methods to Achieve Maximum Business Results.” The presentations is set on June 28 at 3:00 p.m.

Mr. Hanway, for his part, will present a CEO Presentation, “Leveraging Six Sigma to Drive the Acceleration of Business Results.” This is set on June 29 at 9:20 a.m.

Aside from these presentations, CIGNA is also the sponsor for Best Achievement of Six Sigma in Healthcare for the Global Six Sigma Awards program. This year’s award recipient will be named at the Global Six Sigma Awards Gala Dinner on Wednesday, June 28.

The Global Six Sigma Awards program has been established to identify the most outstanding business achievement through the application of Six Sigma and thereby demonstrating to the global business community the real results and excellence which organizations are achieving through the successful implementation of Six Sigma methodologies.

Check out: Summit Website and Awards Program Website.

Link: CIGNA to Present at the WCBF’s Global Six Sigma Summit

Filed under: Services, Awards

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BPOs: Keeping Employees for Six Sigma?

Any company’s success rests on the skill of its employees. Thus, in any Six Sigma deployment, the training of employees takes priority.

The business process outsourcing (BPO) is the new sunshine industry, especially in countries like India, Australia, China, Ireland, and the Philippines. The competition has become so stiff that Indian BPOs are now implementing Six Sigma to move up the value chain and ensure superior quality of service.

Continue reading on Global Business Watch.

Filed under: Deployment

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Six Sigma and Management: An Interview

A couple of months ago, I wrote about how daily management is enhanced by Six Sigma. The two are so closely related in terms of processes and goals that each complements the other well.

However, these processes don’t really have a mind of their own. The two can only be linked successfully if the people working on them are collaborating and coordinating well.

It has been said many times that Six Sigma, or any quality initiative for that matter, is doomed to fail if top management is not supporting it all the way. The initiative to go for process improvement and sustain it should be understood by everyone in the organization, especially management.

The process doesn’t stop there; there are other important considerations as well. An interview with Pete Robustelli, executive vice president of Six Sigma Qualtec (SSQ) sheds light on all the issues surrounding the decision to go for Six Sigma. The following are some of the points raised during the interview:

1. Six Sigma happens to be the thing that’s working best right now and for good reasons. It has the best combination of methodologies, software and results, and it is easy to understand for people at all levels of the
   organization. But it, too, will evolve over time; that’s the nature of continuous improvement.
2. Ensure some business alignment within our performance improvement efforts. Select a specific goal, or maybe two or three goals, that the organization is trying to achieve, and make sure they are aligned with your customers’ requirements so they can deliver your desired business results.
3. The first place to start is by defining who the customers are, what’s important to them and how that aligns to the business goals of the organization. In other words, every company should have some kind of vision or mission of where it wants to be, compared with where it is now.

Question: Assuming that top management understands the true value of a performance improvement initiative and has actively moved to involve people, the results can be quite significant.

Peter Robustelli: Yes, the difference between an executive-sponsored initiative and one without top-level support can be tenfold. What we try to encourage someone to do is to first get agreement within your organization on whom you are and where you want to go. Get agreement about what your customers are truly telling you they want; what kind of customer information do we have about what they’re looking for? The next thing is to ask is “given our agreed-upon direction and what our customers tell us they want, do we have agreement on the critical success factors? Are we delivering to our customer requirements? If not, do we have metrics that allow us to measure our progress in closing the gap?” Next, determine how the organization is structured, and whether it has the critical core business processes to get there, to achieve business goals and satisfy customers. Have those processes been defined and can they be measured? Those gaps, of where your business is and where you want it to head, and how your processes work vs. how you want them to work to meet your goals will be the right kind of things to work on to obtain the biggest impact for your company.

Continue reading…

Filed under: Six Sigma Organizations, Deployment

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Statistics for Six Sigma Green Belts

I saw this book on Informit.com. To me, it’s interesting because according to the description…

The only book on the market that provides a simple nonmathematical presentation of the statistics needed by Six Sigma Green Belts. Every concept is explained in plain English with a minimum of mathematical symbols. Includes real-world examples, step by step instructions and sample output for Minitab and JMP software as well as downloadable, ready to use data sets and templates. Includes applications to service industries to help managers understand the role of Six Sigma in nonmanufacturing industries.

If you’re a Green Belt or working on your certification, this book may be useful for you. Check it out!

Filed under: Training, Software/Technology, Six Sigma References

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Lean Six Sigma on the Electronic Business

Remember Silicon Valley? When it started to grow sometime in 1971, people were made aware of semiconductors, electronics, and other computer-related industries.

Like all other booming businesses however the Valley at one time also experienced the bust. Although many companies morph into another, some others met their deaths, natural or otherwise.

A few months back, Cito Beltran of Straight Talk on ANC interviewed Diosdado “Dado” Banatao, a Filipino visionary who made it big, and still is big, in Silicon Valley. He founded the semiconductor giant Tallwood Venture Capital. In the years that he had been there, he said that he had developed and sold—though not necessarily in that order as he kept some of them–companies. According to him, the key to making it big there is hard work coupled with skills and knowledge of what you’re doing.

Since the talk was about entrepreneurship, they didn’t touch the subject on process or continuous improvement. A recent article on Electronics Business Online cited four electronic companies affected by the dot-com bust in 2001, but were able to bounce back through Lean Six Sigma.

One of the companies is Xerox, whose Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) played a pivotal role in object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), Ethernet, PostScript, and laser printers in the Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 1980s.

Xerox uses an internal measure called “economic profit,” which is project value minus cost, says Bob Shea, communications manager for corporate Lean Six Sigma. Those internal figures (which Xerox doesn’t release) are then rolled into the company’s overall financial numbers.

“We don’t try to separate out the monetary gain we get with Lean Six, because it’s incorporated into the management process,” says Arthur C. Fornari, vice president and corporate deployment officer for Xerox Lean Six Sigma.

Nevertheless, Lean Six projects have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings, cost avoidance and revenue to Xerox, says Shea.

Continue reading… Lean, mean, Six Sigma machines

Filed under: Benefits and Savings, Manufacturing, Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma Organizations

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Focused Sessions on Six Sigma

The International Society of Six Sigma Professionals (ISSSP) is the only professional membership organization dedicated to the advancement of education, research, and implementation of Six Sigma, as well as the integration of Six Sigma with other business practices. It has announced this month’s topic for their focused sessions.

The group believes that Six Sigma project ideas come from everyone who does business with your company: your customers, from engineers, from observant employees, and even from conscientious call center representatives. Thus, they formed these focused sessions to have a venue for airing and capturing these ideas.

On June 13, 2006 at 2:00 PM (EDT), clear your schedules for the Just-in-Time Project Selection: Creating a Pipeline That Accelerates Six Sigma Success. ISSSP invites…

Join us to learn how you can stimulate, aggregate, evaluate, and activate new Six Sigma project ideas by:

• Leveraging the creativity across your entire organization of potential idea generators
• Applying comprehensive evaluation criteria to your project selection process
• Aligning your Six Sigma projects, resources and reporting with your corporate priorities
• Creating a pipeline of approved ideas that Black Belts can seamlessly transition into
• Measuring financial results against strategic goals

Filed under: Training, Deployment

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