Category: Six Sigma

Although I’ve spent my entire career working in the quality and process improvement fields, my undergraduate degree is in economics. I learned that economic cycles are normal, although that’s not to say that they’re uncaused or that the pain created during economic downturns isn’t real. Economic downturns result when there is an imbalance of some…

Project Selection for DMAIC | Quality Digest. As a Quality Digest columnist I tend to be a reader of their other authors, too. This month’s Inside Six Sigma article from Steven Ouellette, The Six Sigma Heretic, provides a pretty good overview of important things to consider when choosing a Six Sigma project. But there’s one…

Study: Ford Quality Rivaling Japanese Counterparts – Industry Headlines – Quality. Ford Motor Co. surpassed Honda in initial vehicle quality for the first time and reached new levels of customer satisfaction with vehicle quality, according to a 2009 U.S. Global Quality Research System (GQRS) survey conducted for Ford by RDA Group of Bloomfield Hills, MI. Ford…

Many people have built the Bar Chart in figure 1 below and called it a Pareto Chart. Even I in my early years a Quality Engineer created this chart as a “Pareto chart”. But this is NOT a Pareto Chart. It is only a Bar Chart. Why? This is because this bar chart does not show us,…

The perfect is the enemy of the good, they say. Six Sigma devotees know all about this. Criticisms of Six Sigma are sometimes quite bizarre. Perhaps the most odd are criticisms of what Six Sigma doesn’t do. For example, Six Sigma has been criticized because On the other hand, Six Sigma gets written off too…

Wow. 83% on time arrivals. And by “on time” we don’t mean, well, on time. On time is defined as within 15 minutes of schedule. This article compares the February on time percentage with January and with February of the previous year. This February was better. Of course, the root cause is assumed to be…

Apparently there are still questions about whether or not a process improvement methodology like lean or Six Sigma can work in healthcare. I find this astonishing and disingenuous. The only real requirement for deploying any process improvement is whether or not there is a process that is done more than once. Healthcare at any respectably…

One of my most popular articles is 101 Things a Six Sigma Black Belt Should Know. Of course, the list is primarily a list of technical tools and skills needed, but anyone who has worked as a change agent knows that there’s more to it than that. Soft skills are at least as important, if…

There is much confusion about the constructs of quality and customer satisfaction (Q/CS). “Quality is doing the right things right,” say some experts, but how can we be assured that a service provider is doing the right things? Here’s an example: “I recognize that the opera singer has a tremendous vocal range [high quality], but…

To say Mary Scott was nervous was an understatement. She was downright scared. Since her new boss told her that Quality 2.0 would be different, there was one change that she most dreaded: making her department’s transition from a cost center to a profit center. “We need to sell our services, people,” Mary announced. She…