If you can’t trust your measurement system, you can’t do anything with the data it generates.

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.

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.

The world is changing so fast today that it is almost impossible to keep up with the latest trends in your own profession.

Can you imagine producing products with a tremendous amount of variation? I’m sure many of you know this all too well.

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 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.

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.

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.

The Six Sigma journey of many organizations has morphed into “lean Six Sigma” during the past couple of years.