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Praveen Gupta
Six Sigma was Bill Smith’s vision for excellence in everything. Prior to Six Sigma, companies were implementing total quality management, statistical process control, pre-control, cost of poor quality, and other techniques with minimal effect. Quality became a promise of “motherhood and apple pie…
Steven Ouellette
Last month I talked about the “sigma” index and how it can be used. So what could be bad about the “sigma” index?Never forget that metrics drive behavior and that people are very, very good at finding a way to succeed when given a goal. It just may not be the thing you wanted them to do. If “sigma…
Praveen Gupta
I’m surprised how quickly we blame a methodology for a business’s lack of performance. We’re always looking for some silver bullet to cure all ills. In contrast, Six Sigma integrates many methodologies to achieve sustained profitable results. When Motorola practiced Six Sigma under the leadership…
Steven Ouellette
Now that we have talked about defining Six Sigma and 10 stupid Six Sigma tricks, I’ll move on to the measure phase and discuss some things that work and don’t work in measuring the effect of Six Sigma. The new metric that Six Sigma brought to us was the sigma index, so let’s start…
Steve Wise
The manager of a local grocery store is having dinner with his statistician friend. The store manager tells his friend about a certain cashier who is stealing from the company.
The manager is frustrated because he thinks he knows who the thief is, but can’t fire the miscreant because the employee…
Praveen Gupta
It’s easier to start a Six Sigma project than to close it successfully. Green Belts and Black Belts are expected to be working on projects constantly, so they work on projects to meet the existing expectations. Some of these projects are unlikely to yield significant improvement due to lack of…
There’s a certain manufacturer makes carbon-based friction material in the form of a disk. A press and die are used in the final manufacturing operation to cure the carbon material into a functioning friction pad. Peak temperature uniformity is a critical characteristic during the cure…
Steven Ouellette
Repent of your wicked ways O fellow Six Sigma Heretics, or surely you shall be smitten (smoted? smited? smartied?) and turned into a pillar of out-of-spec material! The End (of the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks countdown, anyway) is here! What could possibly be the No. 1 reason that Six…
Praveen Gupta
I first read about training in listening skills about 25 years ago. I didn’t really understand the difference between hearing and listening. I thought people had hearing problems. Now I get it.Everybody talks I see people talking loudly on cellular phones at airports, in shopping malls…
There’s a certain manufacturer that makes carbon-based friction material in the form of a disk. A press and die are used in the final manufacturing operation to cure the carbon material into a functioning friction pad. Peak temperature uniformity is a critical characteristic during the…
Steven Ouellette
The end is near! Well, at least the end of the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks (SSST) countdown. The Heretic soldiers on until his appointment with the stake. This month, we arrive at Stupid Six Sigma Trick #2: Neglecting Daily Management. In this SSST, companies get so starry-eyed over the fancy…
Some folks like to use control charts to analyze gauge study results. When using a control chart in this manner, one can assume that the chart should represent a series of gauge studies conducted over a period of time. In this example, let’s say that each morning a gauge is verified by…
Praveen Gupta
Most of us spend our time being busy. We expect a lot, compare our belongings with those of others and feel miserable about the miss-outs. We complain about the way life treats us. While thinking about my New Year’s resolution for 2007, I looked for an opportunity for self-improvement.I…
Steve Wise
Some folks like to use control charts to analyze gauge study results. When using a control chart in this manner, one can assume that the chart should represent a series of gauge studies conducted over a period of time. In this example, let’s say that each morning a gauge is verified by recording…
Steven Ouellette
I had a lot of feedback from interested readers in regards to Stupid Six Sigma Tricks #5, which I jokingly called “Pop Stars Without Clothing,” and which was about the frequent misuse of statistics in the Six Sigma world. Taking heart from this response to what might have been viewed as dusty old…
For the last Brain Teaser, in an interesting spin, sample size was defined as a time window. A is the correct response. The underlying data type falls into the category of defect counts (complaints) within a constant area of opportunity (one hour). These data, of course, follow the…
Praveen Gupta
Businesses have lately been focusing on profit and process improvement. However, profit improvement at any cost to make the upcoming quarter look bright has a price. It appears that most improvement effort leads with efficiency measured by head-count reduction. Improvement shouldn’t be measured by…
A certain company has a complaint department that answers calls for three unique products. Because of failure rates inherent to each product type, some products have a higher expected complaint rate than others. Calls are tallied each hour and categorized by product type…
Steven Ouellette
We are more than halfway through the countdown of our exploration of the kooky, and expensive, mistakes people make in implementing Six Sigma, and I want to talk about something that’s so fundamental people rarely see it—Stupid Six Sigma Trick #4: Overusing DMAIC.
DMAIC stands for define the…
Since “Sick Sigma” was published in April 2006, the public has become much more aware of Six Sigma’s failings. There is little risk today of being burnt at the stake for pointing out Six Sigma’s many faults. Last fall, even Dilbert discredited Six Sigma, pointing out that Six Sigma…
Praveen Gupta
A few years ago, lean thinking came to light. It sounded similar to what I had learned about the “pull” system. I wondered why we renamed cycle time reduction, or just in time (JIT), “lean.” Cycle time reduction was easy to understand and related to responsiveness to customer demands and waste…
An introduction to Six Sigma for direct marketing Six Sigma methods, used correctly and thoroughly for continuous improvement of direct marketing sales, can produce remarkable results:1. At a university work-force education program, total registrations doubled in three years through…
Steven Ouellette
Today marks a milestone in our countdown of the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks. A subjective and unimportant milestone to be sure, but a milestone nonetheless—we have now reached the halfway point. Forget the New Year, this is cause for celebration.
To commemorate this trivial event, let us turn…
Praveen Gupta
Six Sigma was officially launched January 1, 1987, at Motorola, and it took more than nine months to make Six Sigma real. Twenty years later, Six Sigma has grown from a good baby methodology into a mature system that affects thousands of corporations and millions of people and that saves billions…
Steven Ouellette
In this installment of my arbitrary and capricious list of the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks (SSST), let’s talk about an error that is perhaps less frequently made now than it has been, but is still common. I call this error SSST No.6, constraining your improvement activities to…