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Steven Ouellette
“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.” Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903) What’s distance learning? Six Sigma Black Belt training has long been the realm of the elite. It used to be so expensive and required so much time that only companies with the cash and resources to…
Praveen Gupta
A major misunderstanding regarding Six Sigma is its fabricated definition, (e.g. “Six Sigma is a fact-based decision-making methodology…”). I’ve seen people willing to attack anyone utilizing common sense to make decisions without facts. One of the reasons for taking such a strong position…
Praveen Gupta
A major misunderstanding regarding Six Sigma is its fabricated definition, (e.g. “Six Sigma is a fact-based decision-making methodology…”). I’ve seen people willing to attack anyone utilizing common sense to make decisions without facts. One of the reasons for taking such a strong position…
Praveen Gupta
During the last couple of years, I’ve interacted with several United Auto Workers (UAW) associates. Irrespective of what the former Big Three do, they’re all trying to do a good job.I’ve had the chance to teach some classes to UAW members. It always amazes me how people make money in the auto…
The purpose of process data analysis is to answer the question, "May the observed data fluctuations reasonably be attributed to common-cause variation?" The principal use of the Shewhart control chart is to guide efforts for process improvement by assisting in the discovery of peculiarities in the…
Ken Levine
Engaging your workforce is a major obstacle in a lean Six Sigma implementation. Only a limited number of employees will initially participate in Six Sigma improvement projects. It can also take one to two years before all employees participate in a lean kaizen event. It’s best to encourage…
Praveen Gupta
Our minds continually perform root cause analysis, which is a way of answering our questions about our surroundings and quenching our curiosity. We establish cause-and-effect relationships between what we see and what we do, or what we get and what we do, or what we want to get and what we need to…
Praveen Gupta
Teamwork has always been considered a critical component of completing complex projects that require significant improvement. The process of teamwork has been well-documented, but teamwork is still often elusive. Why?
When teams succeed, it’s often for the following reasons:
Strong leadership
Well…
Daniel S. Munson
The Empire State Building in New York City, with its 103 stories, 73 elevators, 2,500,000 feet of electrical cable and 6,500 windows, was built in 405 days. The framework rose at a rate of four-and-a-half stories per week. That’s nearly a floor a day. Most impressive was that the project came in…
Praveen Gupta
Most Six Sigma initiatives are project-oriented. And although implementing Six Sigma methodology on a project can lead to some improvement, a company can’t achieve full benefit of implementing Six Sigma. To maximize Six Sigma benefits, a corporation must commit to the methodology in its entirety.…
Praveen Gupta
The price of Six Sigma consulting, training and certification has been coming down and, interestingly, so is the amount or the rate of improvement being reported. We no longer hear success stories like Motorola or GE in larger number commensurate with the growth of Six Sigma, as evidenced by the…
Marilyn Fischbach
Deployment is one of the most critical elements of a successful Six Sigma program. Top-down support, champion training, wide publicity and Six Sigma awareness training for all employees are common components. In addition, employees selected to be Black or Green Belts must be trained and projects…
Tom Pyzdek
Some years back I, along with Drs. Doug Montgomery, Bryan Dodson, John Ramberg and others in the quality community, became concerned that there was no standardized criteria for becoming a Six Sigma Black Belt—or any other Six Sigma belt for that matter. The leading quality organization at that time…
Thomas R. Cutler
Kanban, in its most simplifying role, is a visual signal (or cue) that something needs to be replenished. More specifically, lean manufacturers today use kanban to drive a process to make, move or buy the appropriate parts. Thus, kanban has become one of the fundamental building blocks of a pull (…
Praveen Gupta
Companies are facing challenges in sustaining the energy and resources to continually benefit from Six Sigma. Black Belts face challenges in continuing to work on projects as these are becoming increasingly difficult to identify. Experts are talking about the ”Death of Six Sigma.“ Company…
Praveen Gupta
I had to catch a 6:10 a.m. flight the other day. The day before, I’d returned from work, done the normal stuff, prepared for the flight and finally had gone to bed so I could get up early the next morning. I got up around 3:00 a.m., got ready and went to the airport. As expected, traffic on road…
“Jim, how do we know that your project made any improvement?” asked the Six Sigma champion. The Black Belt candidate looked confused. “Um, the sponsor said he was happy with the outcome,” he offered. The members of the certification board looked skeptically at one another: “But the only metrics…
Tom Pryor
My twin grandsons celebrated their first birthday on July 1, 2001. And while the majority of people reading this article don’t know Alex and Austen, there is another set of twins celebrating their fifteenth birthday this year whose names are familiar. Born in 1986, they are Six Sigma and Activity…
Failure mode and effect analysis, or FMEA, is an attempt to delineate all possible failures, their effects on the system, the likelihood of occurrence and the probability that the failure will go undetected. FMEA provides an excellent basis for classification of characteristics such as identifying…
Praveen Gupta
Companies often have numerous Six Sigma projects in the pipeline, and Six Sigma belts are busy working on projects. However, statistical thinking suggests that not all projects will be equally successful. In fact, the amount of improvement could vary significantly from one project to another. In an…
Scott Paton’s "The Chinese are Coming! The Chinese are Coming!" (Quality Digest, February 2005) describes how China’s Chery Automobile Co. plans to undercut American automakers’ prices by up to 30 percent. The article professes that neither tariffs nor layoffs are the solution to the hemorrhage of…
Praveen Gupta
The Six Sigma initiative starts with an executive’s idea of achieving excellence and superior results. Whether the initiation is based on hearsay or the strategic move, it starts with communication among the executives—or employees. Likewise, throughout the implementation of Six Sigma, constant…
As quality professionals, we frequently report such facts as proportions (percentages), process capability indices, averages and standard deviations as if we know what we’re talking about. But what’s our actual level of confidence? All of our observations and our understanding are based upon data…
”Cause and effect, Chain of events, All of this chaos makes perfect sense” —Joe Diffe Third Rock From the Sun In my recent article, "How to Lead with Six Sigma: What are you solving for?" I discussed the need for leaders to clearly identify just what they’re…
“When, therefore, a man absorbed in the effect which is seen has not yet learned to discern those which are not seen, he gives way to fatal habits, not only by inclination, but by calculation.”
—Frederic Bastiat”That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen,” 1850
“In the South Seas there is a…