All Features
Praveen Gupta
Most quality management systems don’t produce the desired results because of the way companies use it to affect their bottom line.
A QMS is often considered to be a burden, and there’s apathy in all levels of the organization toward quality. ISO 9001 systems, for example, are considered to be paper…
Steven Ouellette
The Stupid Six Sigma Tricks countdown continues this month with an increasingly common error: “Inadequate Infrastructure.” By infrastructure, I mean those systems and processes that need to be in place in order to support the objectives of Six Sigma. Regardless of how you define Six…
Praveen Gupta
Globalization has led to worldwide economic growth, shared resources and shared business functions. Some countries dominate manufacturing, others software or the service industry. The quality of manufacturing operations has been improving for decades, but the quality of service appears to be…
Thomas R. Cutler
In a repetitive manufacturing environment, Six Sigma’s quantification is much easier than in the engineer-to-order (ETO) manufacturing environment, where no two products are identical.
Six Sigma is a program that affects the entire company. What have been missing for ETO manufacturers are the…
Steven Ouellette
So far, we’ve discussed Stupid Six Sigma Tricks #10: Conflating systems, methods and tools and #9: Confusing breakthrough with continuous improvement. This month, I’ll spend some time on a more subtle, and no less costly mistake that, in its extreme form, we’ll call Stupid Six Sigma Trick #8:…
Praveen Gupta
Lean and Six Sigma have been implemented for many years and organizations have benefited from both methodologies. With Six Sigma, corporations have reaped benefits in the billions of dollars. With lean, organizations have reported up to 90-percent reductions in space utilization and cycle-times.…
In the last InsideSixSigma issue, we published a brain teaser by Steve Wise, who proposed a scenario and asked you to pick a chart that best described the situation in a manufacturing operation. Here, Wise gives the correct response and comments on the wrong ones. Correct response The…
Steven Ouellette
This month let’s examine another common mistake that some people (not my loyal, intelligent, heretical and, let’s face it, downright attractive readers) make when they use Six Sigma. I expect to seriously annoy some practitioners when I say that Six Sigma isn’t a method of continuous…
Steve Wise
In a certain operation, a part is subject to a high-temperature curing cycle. The ideal curing scan is illustrated in the chart below. The oven chamber begins at room temperature, ramps up to a conditioning temperature of about 80 degrees, dwells for four minutes, ramps up again to the curing…
Praveen Gupta
Editor’s note: This is an attempt to use DMAIC methodology to resolve conflicts, in concert with the approach presented in an article titled “Feds may unleash Six Sigma on terrorism” by Del Jones in USA Today, October 30, 2002. By no means does either the author or Quality Digest consider the…
Tony Coray
One of the latest trends in the ongoing evolution of Six Sigma is its rising popularity among college students and its appearance in universities’ curricula. These courses are exposing students to the power of data-driven quality improvement and, in many cases, giving them firsthand…
Steven Ouellette
As I said in my premier Heretic column, “Dogma and Definition,” I’m interested in examining our assumptions and premises about Six Sigma so we can discard the dross and refine the potential benefits in implementing it.To that end, I have decided to co-opt an omnipresent element of pop…
Praveen Gupta
Considering the leadership at Motorola and General Electric provided by stalwarts such as Bob Galvin and Jack Welch, respectively, I believe that two leaders with totally different styles can get similar results using the same tools. When I worked at Motorola in Bob Galvin’s time, there was a rule…
David Schwinn
Once upon a time, in a real, live U.S. corporation, top management decided that Six Sigma was a good idea. They trained up many Black Belts to lead projects to produce documented savings as defined by the existing accounting system. To encourage people to be successful, the Black Belts—…
Praveen Gupta
At a recent committee meeting of a professional association, the speaker talked about print media and the Internet. Print media are struggling because the Internet can more easily disseminate information. The Internet is changing the world, and print media are those most directly affected by this…
Steven Ouellette
I
n Dirk Dusharme’s First Word in the April 2006 issue of Quality Digest, he sneaks into the back of the “Church of the Six Sigma” and cannily reports the goings on. In this column, I will burst in through the doors dressed in motley and try to pry the scales off of your eyes, chanting, “DMAIC…
Praveen Gupta
Six Sigma has gained a reputation as a data-driven statistical methodology for process improvement. If the statistical methodology by itself were responsible for Six Sigma’s success, then there would be nothing new in Six Sigma. Methodologies based on data-driven statistics have been known for many…
All too often FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis), DFMEA (Design, Failure Modes, and Effects Analysis) or FMECA (Failure Mode, Effects, and Criticality Analysis) ends up costing a company hundreds or thousands of dollars to prepare and returns nothing by way of payback, increased…
Praveen Gupta
I talk to a lot of people and most of them are stressed at work and carrying it over to their homes. The question then becomes, “What drives performance—fear or fun?”If someone asks employees what it’s like to work at Google, the most likely answer is that it’s exciting to work in a fun,…
Dr T Burns
In 1633, opposition to the common viewpoint could mean death. This was the case with Galileo when he proposed that the Earth revolved around the sun. He was tried for heresy. Of course things are different today. People who question dogma are no longer burnt at the stake. Instead, they’re branded…
David C. Crosby
Zero defects is an idea that was discovered in the early 1960s. It was articulated by Phil Crosby and first implemented at the Martin company in Orlando, Florida. Zero defects enjoyed widespread popularity until the mid 1970s, and almost every major company and their suppliers had a zero-defects…
Praveen Gupta
I’ve been reading about the 1.5 sigma shift for some time. Several different interpretations have been published and people are losing sleep over this matter. Some have even driven a stake into the ground to fervidly defend their position. My intent in writing this column is to simplify…
Praveen Gupta
Many people believe that they can buy Six Sigma certification and get some marketing advantage. By documenting a few more procedures, they can achieve Six Sigma recognition. For some, Six Sigma is a fact-based methodology made of fancy statistical tools that solve all business problems.…
Gregory Roth II
I, for one, am tired of the quality flavor of the month. It isn’t quite that bad but it seems like it at times. Have you been through statistical quality control, TQM, total quality speed, re-engineering, zero defects, quality circles, SPC, Motorola Six Sigma, AlliedSignal Six Sigma, GE…
Praveen Gupta
Corporations have been implementing improvement programs as far back as I can remember, at least since my first job at Motorola in 1981. I’ve noticed that more and more organizations—whether it’s Motorola, Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., Delphi or smaller, privately-held companies—measure…