Six Sigma Round-up
Posted by: meikah | 13 February 2007 | 9:14 pm
Here’s another round of Six Sigma news in the blogosphere.
First at iSixSigma blogs, Michael Marx features Graham Richard, Mayor of Fortwayne City, Indiana. If you recall, I’ve written about Fortwayne before, calling it Six Sigma City. I’m glad they’ve continued their Six Sigma journey, and I hope other cities will learn from them. Mayor Richard published a book titled, Performance is the Best Politics: How to create high-performance government using Lean Six Sigma. Check out Michael’s take on it. You may also check out Fortwayne’s Six Sigma initiatives here.
Next, over at Six Sigma Blog, Priya Jestin asks a good question, “Black Belts: Your Own Or Hired?” and went on to discuss the pros and cons of having in-house Black Belts to handle Six Sigma projects or getting a consultant to do it. While it’s true that there are good and bad sides to either way, I believe there is more value in the long term to get a consultant to train your people initially. After which, your trained Black Belts will continue the projects that have been started.
At ISSSP, its feature is on IBM Consulting Services: “Aligning quality efforts to drive Baldrige quality performance.” The article highlights George Byrne and Bob Norris’s, principal consultants at IBM Business Consulting Services paper on Using Six Sigma As an Engine to Drive Baldrige Quality Performance. It’s good information on strategically applying Six Sigma principles to raise Baldrige performance. After all, some recognition for a job well done is always a good motivation to aim higher.
Filed under: Awards, Public Sector, Six Sigma Organizations, Six Sigma References, Training
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Six Sigma Reference Feature: On Processes @ Discover6Sigma.org
Posted by: meikah | 12 February 2007 | 11:39 pm
In Six Sigma, the word “process” or “processes” is a popular concept: know your processes; improve your processes. In other words, when you do something, you go through some process. So, today, let us take a closer look at processes.
Sanjaya of Discover6Sigma has a good discussion on what are processes, what are involved in a process, and process performance.
…But what is a process? Common dictionary meaning of process is “series of actions, changes, or functions bringing about a result.”
…On a formal note, it is something that accepts one or more inputs from its suppliers, transforms them into one or more outputs for its customers. The transformation, carried out using a defined sequence of activities, usually adds value to inputs to produce outputs.
Related story:
iSixSigma, SIPOC
Filed under: Deployment, Processes, Six Sigma References, Tools/Toolkits
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Six Sigma and Other Quality Issues
Posted by: meikah | 12 February 2007 | 12:06 am
Time and again, we are told, and even those in the know, agree that Six Sigma is not a silver bullet, which can solve all process improvement problems.
At one time, it has been observed that many organizations do not achieve the savings they hope to achieve with Six Sigma. Well, as quality people would often say, efforts toward improvement is a journey that needs a long-term commitment. And you have to commmit to quality again and again.
I believe that Six Sigma or any other quality strategies is better than nothing at all. What organizations need to do is to evaluate their processes well, and choose which quality methodology is best for them.
Let me share with you today an amusing commentary on the human side of business. It is Dale Dauten’s (The Corporate Curmudgeon) interview with his fellow executive at Mundane Industries ( 
), the head of Quality Management, Donald “Zero” Difetto. Published on BostonWorks, the interview touches on Six Sigma, zero-defect initiatives, and other quality issues. The issues are tinged with humor but if you read through it, it makes sense. 
DALE: I invited you to join me because I wanted your opinion on a new study. The folks at QualPro, a research company I wrote about recently, searched for corporations announcing new Six Sigma programs, then looked at what happened to each company’s stock price. Of the 58 companies they reviewed, only six had stocks that outperformed the S&P 500, while 52 underperformed. That’s 10 percent up and 90 percent down. Could it be possible that quality is to the manufacturing business what health food is to the restaurant business — everybody says they want it, but nobody actually buys it?
ZERO: So are you anti-quality? Pro-defect? We’re building the best Mundane Industries products ever, and yes, our stock price is falling, but I don’t see how more defects are going to boost the stock price. Take our least-profitable division, our toy business. Not our fault. Our product returns are approaching zero. We are, in effect, making perfect toys.
DALE: Good example. Our lead product this last Christmas season was our “Me too” competitor to “Tickle Me Elmo,” our “Wedgie Me Wayne.” Nobody returned it because nobody bought it. So it’s flawless production of a product nobody wants.
ZERO: That’s marketing, not production. The Wall Street Journal had an article on the stock-price research that quoted Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford professor and Six Sigma advocate, as saying: “You can’t do just one little thing. Low cholesterol is just one measure of health. In the same way, quality management is just one piece of the puzzle, but not the answer to the whole puzzle.”
Source:
BostonWorks, “Creating flawless products no one wants” with link provided by Six Sigma Zone.
Filed under: Benefits and Savings, Interview, Retail, Sales
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Innovation of the Week: P&G’s Open-Innovation Work
Posted by: meikah | 9 February 2007 | 2:55 am
Procter & Gamble is the world’s leading manufacturer of products ranging from personal care, household cleaning, laundry detergents, prescription drugs, and disposable nappies.
With the variety of their products and the competition they have to face every day, you would wonder how they are able to go about their R&D successfully. Well, the answer is innovation. Isn’t it always?
Read about P&G’s Open-Innovation Work:
InnovateForum recognizes A.G. Lafley, CEO of P&G, as Thought Leader of the Year for his pioneering work in popularizing the notion of “open innovation,” and successfully applying an open-innovation business model to drive product development.
Based on this philosophy, Lafley has since taken the bold stance that P&G should obtain 50 percent of its innovations from outside the company. To accomplish this, today the company collaborates with organizations around the world, “systematically searching for proven technologies, packages and products that we can improve, scale up, and market, either on our own or in partnership with other companies,” says Larry Huston, P&G’s vice president for innovation and knowledge, as quoted in an article in the Harvard Business Review.
Source:
InnovateForum.com, “P&G CEO Earns Thought-Leader Award for Open-Innovation Work”
Related Story:
CIO.com, “Capturing the Elements of Innovation”
Filed under: Innovation Update, Manufacturing, Software/Technology
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Managing Inventory Through Lean Six Sigma
Posted by: meikah | 8 February 2007 | 12:15 am
While inventory serves as a buffer for fluctuating material costs and varying supplies delivery time, it can also be every business’s nemesis. That is if the organization has no supply chain or investment management system in place.
Lean Six Sigma can also reduce excessive and obsolete inventory says James Martin, writing for iSixSigma. Inventory problems are addressed by looking at root causes, such as long lead times, poor forecasting accuracy, quality problems or design obsolescence. If only for these reasons, an organization really has to choose well the person assigned in procurement. He must be someone who makes calculated risks and very knowledgeable about the market and the forces that play in it.
Using DMAIC and Lean tools, improvement teams can drive to those mentioned root causes and examine them closely. According, to the article, this is how it will go:
In an actual improvement project, the team begins an inventory analysis by defining the project’s goals in the Define phase. Using these goals as guidelines, relevant questions are developed to enable the team to understand how the system operates. Data fields corresponding to these questions are identified and extracted from information technology (IT) systems. The data fields are then organized in the form of an inventory model to provide the information necessary to answer the team’s questions and understand the root causes of the inventory problem.
After the Define phase, the team begins to evaluate measurement systems and plan data collection activities. This is the Measure phase of the project. An important activity in this phase is an on-site physical count by location of inventoried items associated with the problem. This is done to measure valuation accuracy relative to stated book value. Measurement analyses also are conducted of management reports and their related workflow systems. These analyses determine the accuracy of key supply chain metrics such as lead time, lot size, expected demand and its variation, forecasting accuracy (different from demand variation), on-time delivery and other metrics that may be related to an inventory investment problem. Unfortunately, supply chain metrics often are scattered across the several software systems within an organization. These systems include the forecasting module, master production schedule module, materials requirements planning module, inventory record files, warehouse management system module and similar IT systems.
After verification of a system’s metrics, the improvement team begins data collection to capture information necessary to answer the team’s questions developed during the Define phase. Relevant information, which may help the team in its root-cause investigation, usually includes suppliers, lead times, expected demand and its variation, lot sizes, storage locations, delivery information, customers and other facts.
Source: iSixsigma, “Lean Six Sigma to Reduce Excess and Obsolete Inventory,” link provided by Promax Consulting
*Photo credit: Stockxpert.com
Filed under: Inventory, Lean Six Sigma
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Lean Six Sigma Round-up
Posted by: meikah | 6 February 2007 | 9:54 pm
It’s time for the Six Sigma round-up once again. Let’s go lean this time and see what’s the latest on combining Lean and Six Sigma.
The new blog, Lean Six Sigma Academy, has a very interesting post on Standard Work. I’ve done quite some reading on continuous improvement efforts, but I have to be honest it’s my first time to read about this. Ron outlines the three components of standard work namely, Takt Time (= Net Available Time per Day / Customer Demand per Day), Work Sequence (the order in which an operator performs manual operations), and SWIP (Standard Work in Process = (Manual Time + Auto Time) / Takt Time). What’s great about the concept of standard work is that it takes into account the following components involved in doing work: the time to do a task, the tasks to be done and its sequence, and SWIP evaluates the process.
Another new Lean blog is 63 Buckets. On this blog, I choose the one which lists the implications of adopting a lean policy on environmental performance. There is much talk these days about global warming, or alternative sources of energy to curb environmental degradation. However, I think we have not touched much on having a lean organization to eliminate wastes. The list goes:
- fewer defects decreases the number of products that must be scrapped;
- fewer defects also means that the raw materials, energy, and resulting waste associated with the scrap are eliminated;
- fewer defects decreases the amount of energy, raw material, and wastes that are used or generated to fix defective products that can be re-worked.
- lean tools focus attention on reducing conditions that can result in accidents, spills, and equipment malfunctions and potentially increase product durability and reliability, thereby increasing product lifespan.
Then at The Sixth Sigma Weblog, it gives a shout out on a Lombardi webinar that will explore the integration of Lean Six Sigma and BPM initiatives. The webinar is happening tomorrow, Feb. 7, at 2:00pm ET or 18:00 GMT. You can still catch it!
Filed under: Events/Announcements, Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma References, Sustainable Business, Tips
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Six Sigma Reference Feature: Six Sigma Communications @ infomap.com
Posted by: meikah | 5 February 2007 | 9:36 pm
During the Best of Six Sigma Practices seminar, I envied the three companies that shared their Six Sigma journey. It was quite obvious that they had addressed the success factors to begin with. What are these? They had the leadership, they had management support, they had people to train for Six Sigma and go into Six Sigma projects, and they had allocated a portion of their budget to do it.
How could they go wrong? From the open forum discussion, I learned that to sustain the enthusiasm and ensure the Control phase of the DMAIC, there must the right motivation and the timely communication. Reports are made accessible by everyone in the organization, and I’m guessing these reports are in the language that everyone can easily understand.
So, for today’s Six Sigma reference feature, I’m sharing with you a very useful article on “Six Sigma Communications: The Missing Link in Your Six Sigma Strategy?”
Written by Doug Gorman for Information Mapping, the article discusses how Six Sigma projects gone pffft because of miscommunication. I like this part:
Adding Six Sigma to the Communication Mix
Six Sigma initiatives will require you to significantly increase the quality and quantity of communication within your organization. But let’s face it, most organizations are already struggling with communications that are unfocused and difficult to read, with buried key points in endless lines of irrelevant information. The number of poorly written e-mail messages, reports, and proposals that come across their desks each day already overburdens managers. And workers already have difficulty interpreting all of the complicated policies, processes and procedures they are supposed to follow. Adding Six Sigma ideas, reports, proposals, solutions, project updates, and process changes to the mix will only add to the problem–unless they are presented in a clear, effective way that highlights key points and allows readers to quickly access and understand the information they need.
Adopting organization-wide communication standards, methods, and protocols, and adding communication skills training to the Six Sigma curriculum will help Six Sigma teams communicate and sell their ideas, plans, and solutions internally, will make life easier for overburdened managers, and will substantially increase a project’s likelihood of success.
Source:
Information Mapping, “Six Sigma Communications: The Missing Link in Your Six Sigma Strategy?”
Filed under: Communication, Deployment, Information Mapping, Six Sigma References, Team Dynamics
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Six Sigma on Tour
Posted by: meikah | 5 February 2007 | 1:20 am
It seems like Six Sigma is out to spread some good news this year. For one, Six Sigma Showcase Software will be on tour starting March 1, 2007. Hertzler Systems Inc., a leading provider of real-time data acquisition and analytics software has teamed with three other leading Six Sigma software providers and the International Society of Six Sigma Professionals (ISSSP) to make this tour possible.
This workshop will introduce Six Sigma leaders to these tools.”
DiGiTAL50.com reports:
The free workshop will introduce five unique and complementary tools that support Six Sigma. Attendees will:
- Meet software vendors face-to-face to discuss their needs and applications
- See how technology can help you become data driven
- Get a free 30-day evaluation copy of each software package
- See how you can make better use of your existing data, or build real-time systems that better support your program
- Software packages that will be demonstrated on the Six Sigma Software Showcase Tour are:
- Minitab 15 – The industry standard for statistical analysis.
- GainSeeker Suite – Real-time data collection and analytics that frees you from the Six Sigma Data Shuffle.
- RapAnalyst – Sophisticated artificial intelligence technology on the desktop.
- Crystal Ball – Simulation and optimization tools for design and forecasting.
- Quality Companion 2 – Plan, organize and execute successful Six Sigma projects.
Source:
DigiTAL50.com, Hertzler Systems Partners with Minitab, Hyperion, ISSSP, and Raptor International to Present Six Sigma Software Showcase Tour, link provided by Six Sigma Zone.
*Photo credit: Photodisc.com
Filed under: Events/Announcements, Software/Technology
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Innovation Thoughts of the Week from Dave Pollard
Posted by: meikah | 2 February 2007 | 1:42 am
Today, I’m sharing with you some very interesting thoughts on innovation from Dave Pollard’s blog, How to Save the World.
Aptly titled, “A Prescription for Business Innovation: Creating Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs,” Dave tackles the following points:
- One: Learning from our past: How Need Drives Innovation
- Two: Man’s Earliest Innovations: A Brief History of Technology
- Three: Six Principles about the Innovation Process
- Four: Innovation & Society: How Technologies Limit Freedom, Human Nature Confounds Innovation, and Consumer Decision Tools Doom Marketing
- Five: The Structure & Culture of Innovative Organizations: Business Gets Feminine and Consumers Seize Power from Producers
- Six: Prescription for an Innovative Organization
- Seven: Applying the Prescription: Some Examples
I agree with him that from a need springs the desire to break through and then to innovate. If I were to put this side by side with Six Sigma initiatives, isn’t it that we start with a need to solve a problem and then goes on to the path of solving that problem and making sure it stays away. A lot like doing the DMAIC!
Source: How to Save the World, A Prescription for Business Innovation: Creating Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs
