All Features
Tim Burke
For years, customers and auditors have been preaching to suppliers the need for the FMEA (failure mode and effects analysis) to be a “living” document. There are probably several interpretations of what it means to have a living FMEA, but one thing is for sure—the FMEA must be updated whenever real…
William A. Levinson
“Then the Husaria broke into a wild g allop and the heavy mass of men and horses cascaded over the Turkish ranks, bowling over the first, slicing through the second… The Grand Vizir leapt onto a horse and made his own escape moments before the winged riders thundered up to the tent and the banner…
Sarah Fister Gale
In a lean environment, training is the last part of the production process to be transformed by the new approach to efficiency. While smaller work groups are streamlining steps and multitasking to eliminate waste and improve output, individuals continue to be linked to single skills or production…
Paul Mullenhour
Six Sigma is a powerful tool for effecting change within an organization. Since its development in the late 1980s, it’s helped companies dramatically improve business processes, increase customer satisfaction to new levels and save hundreds of millions of dollars. To say it has the ability to…
The maintenance problem Too many times, in lean manufacturing and other lean environments, 10- to 40-year-old equipment is re-deployed, moved and organized into lean cells without adequate concern or attention to maintenance reliability. In a lean cell, unscheduled equipment downtime usually costs…
Chuck Doyle
Many organizations need answers to some key questions about lean and quality management: Is there a difference between quality and value? Should we have two teams, one for continuous improvement and one for lean? What roles would each have? What are the differences? The source for this…
Jeffrey S. Goss
Six Sigma, the statistical approach focused on increasing profitability by improving efficiency, has been part of the engineering world since the 1980s. Now, new innovative online and on-campus programs at Arizona State University are shaking up the way people all over the globe are…
Mike Micklewright
I’m a huge proponent of both Six Sigma and lean manufacturing. I’ve been teaching the tools used in Six Sigma for more than 15 years, and I make a portion of my living from consulting and training in these areas.
However, Six Sigma and lean manufacturing are business improvement processes that…
Derrell S. James
Six Sigma. Lean. What do these initiatives have to do with the supply chain? The short answer is everything. The origins of these approaches are based, in Six Sigma’s case, on continuous improvements in quality and variation control, and in lean’s case, on production velocity and…
Praveen Gupta
Six Sigma is an expensive initiative with a huge potential for return on investment. However, there are risks associated with it. False starts, lack of commitment or lack of planning may lead to unsatisfactory results. Considering the complexity of the Six Sigma process, one must minimize the risks…
Arthur G. Davis
Falling revenues and changing customer requirements have forced many companies to look for ways to reduce the workload on current staff while developing long-term solutions. When companies are forced to downsize, the increased workload on remaining employees frequently results in stress…
Using Six Sigma initiatives to focus on improving the performance of business and manufacturing processes isn’t a new concept. But a growing number of manufacturers seeking to stay competitive and improve profitability are, instead, turning to Six Sigma to provide stronger value to…
Greg Brue
From its inception, Six Sigma was considered revolutionary. The six original pioneers who implemented the methodology at Allied Signal--the only true Senior Master Black Belts--vowed that the system would unearth inefficiencies in business operations that lead to outrageous levels of…
(Publisher’s Note: This article, is reprinted with permission from THE INFORMED OUTLOOK, in which it first appeared in Nov. 2003.)
Following the ISO 9001:2000 transition, the future of quality management continues to align with that of business management. The challenge in both cases is for…
Ronald Ames
As a methodology, Six Sigma has been around since the 1980s. Yet it took a couple of U.S. industry giants, Allied Signal and GE, to draw the world’s attention to the benefits the program offers businesses. Even so, many companies fail to integrate Six Sigma into their corporate cultures due to a…
Kamal Hassan
Would you spend millions of dollars for a return of more than a billion? Sure you would, but that’s just a fantasy, right? It wasn’t just a pipedream for GE’s CEO Jack Welch, who expected to reap a hefty return for every dollar his company spent on Six Sigma. Needless to say, he did. In 1997, GE…
Rick Beaver
Would you spend millions of dollars for a return of more than a billion? Sure you would, but that’s just a fantasy, right? It wasn’t just a pipedream for GE’s CEO Jack Welch, who expected to reap a hefty return for every dollar his company spent on Six Sigma. Needless to say, he did. In 1997, GE…
Howard Cooper
To succeed in our increasingly competitive global economy, many companies have implemented lean manufacturing, a step beyond just-in-time production systems. Other companies claim they’re "lean" but hedge on the concept. They maintain work-in-progress inventories because they fear the consequences…
John Nycz
Jack Welch had a unique vision of an organization that made data-based decisions. At times his tactics for bringing this about were described as “violent,” “abrupt” and “painful,” but his methods worked. GE’s transformation is still a modern model of how to make quantum shifts in the way a huge…