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Knowledge at Wharton
In 2008, the University of North Carolina (UNC) Health Care System faced a challenge: Length of stay per patient at this major nonprofit health system and academic medical center was longer than it needed to be. If administrators could figure out how to cut the length of stay by an average of just…
Steven Ouellette
In the past couple of articles, we have been having fun together testing whether a measurement device is usable for the crazy purpose of determining if we are actually making product in or out of specification. Last month, we performed a measurement systems analysis (MSA) “potential study” using a…
Barbara A. Cleary
What is known as “point mentality” is a knee-jerk response to what appears to be a problem. We may learn this when we take our child’s temperature and find that it’s high; we are inclined to do something right away—give ibuprofen, orange juice, and bed rest—rather than waiting to see if this is a…
Jon Miller
Editor's note: At the time this interview was published by Gemba Research LLC, Toyota hadn't announced a fix to the sticky accelerator issue that caused the company to recall approximately 2.3 million select vehicles. On Feb. 1, the company announced that its engineers have developed a solution…
Donald J. Wheeler
In my column of Jan. 7, “The Right and Wrong Ways of Computing Limits,” I looked at the problems in computing limits for average charts. This column will consider the right and wrong ways of computing limits for charts for individual values. As before, a data set will be given that you can use to…
Tom Pyzdek
While we work to improve quality and efficiency, our leaders manage our organizations into oblivion. Literally. Something is terribly wrong. Leaders of major corporations in virtually all industries do things that cause them to, either accidentally or deliberately, destroy billions of dollars in…
Steve Moore
The purpose of this article is to give you an appreciation of the Quincunx as an educational tool for teaching some of the theory behind the tools and concepts of so-called modern quality management. The Quincunx is often seen in the possession of organizations practicing in-house education of…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
In the early 1970s I was a young teenager who was completely caught up in the Zeitgeist. I admired the long-haired rebels and radicals who were engaged in protesting the establishment and developing the counter-culture. I didn’t really know what any of that meant, but to me it was all about…
Steven Ouellette
If you can’t trust your measurement system, you can’t do anything with the data it generates. Last month, in “ Letting You In On a Little Secret,” we talked about the purpose of measurement system analysis (MSA) and I gave you a neat spreadsheet that will do MSA for you, as well as some data (…
H. James Harrington
In the first column of this three-part series, I reviewed an interview that was conducted in 1988 with F. James McDonald, president of General Motors. In this interview he explained what GM was doing to improve quality and customer satisfaction. Typical activities that GM was involved in during…
Donald J. Wheeler
Today virtually everyone uses software to create process behavior charts, yet the available software is notoriously unreliable in terms of the way the limits are computed. This column will explain and illustrate the difference between the correct and some of the incorrect ways of computing three-…
H. James Harrington
The world is changing so fast today that it is almost impossible to keep up with the latest trends in your own profession. If you are not spending at least two hours per day updating yourself in your chosen profession, you probably are behind the current state of the art. It has been estimated that…
Mike Micklewright
Can you imagine producing products with a tremendous amount of variation? I’m sure many of you know this all too well. I mean, here you’re trying to produce the same products, trying to ensure consistency, and many of the products you produce have different shades of color, many function…
Steven Wachs
The purpose of using control charts is to regularly monitor a process so that significant process changes may be detected. These process changes may be a shift in the process average (X-bar) or a change in the amount of variation in the process. The variation observed when the process is operating…
Knowledge at Wharton
The financial services sector has been a laggard in adopting lean tools and practices, perhaps because of their manufacturing origins. But those attitudes are slowly changing. As more banks discover the benefits of lean operations—such as lower costs, fewer errors, faster cycle times and far…
Gain sharing and lean Six Sigma are highly complementary systems that are mutually reinforcing. While both efforts are excellent by themselves in improving productivity, quality, and a variety of other measures, they are much more powerful together. Both systems are based on the principles of…
Stewart Anderson
The 5 Whys is a well-known root cause analysis technique that originated at Toyota and has been adopted by many other organizations that have implemented lean manufacturing principles. Unlike more sophisticated problem-solving techniques, the 5 Whys doesn’t involve data segmentation, hypothesis…
Aditya Bhalla
The Six Sigma journey of many organizations has morphed into “lean Six Sigma” during the past couple of years.
While the fusion of two methodologies has yielded benefits, it has also spawned a number of urban legends on the context and relevance of combining the two methodologies.
What…
Tim Leary
Story update 11/23/2010: A paragraph was added to the end of this case study to reflect the current state of the company's quality initiatives.
Acme Technology Services (not their real name) is a privately-held provider of technology-enabled business solutions. Acme’s retail software division…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
After a meal at a local Chinese restaurant, my fortune cookie said, “If you keep too busy learning the tricks of the trade, you may never learn the trade.” When I think about how this applies to Six Sigma, it seems obvious that far too much Six Sigma training is dedicated to the tricks of the…
Davis Balestracci
The economy has become a convenient excuse on which to pin the blame for everything—especially job losses. Well, in the case of quality positions, yes… and no.
A sobering thought: Will the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule) inevitably apply to the quality profession? I think so. It’s time to “…
Jon Miller
For a group of people who claim to practice management by fact, questioning the as-given condition, we in the lean community have a troubling habit of citing and accepting made-up lean enterprise statistics. In fact, I would say that at least 50 percent of statistics cited about lean have been…
WILLIAM SCHERKENBACH
I’ve spent most of the past two years living in China where I have learned much on how enterprise is managed over there. Many people have said that this century belongs to Asia. That may be, but they have a lot to learn and change before that happens. They cannot depend on cheap rote labor to…
Donald J. Wheeler
The four questions of data analysis are the questions of description, probability, inference, and homogeneity. Any data analyst needs to know how to organize and use these four questions to be able to obtain meaningful and correct results.
The description question
Given a collection of…
Knowledge at Wharton
“Lean” has come to mean an integrated, end-to-end process viewpoint that combines the concepts of waste elimination, just-in-time inventory management, built-in quality, and worker involvement supported by a cultural focus on problem solving. Can such practical principles be applied to innovation…