• The Lean, Six Sigma, and Quality Triad

    In response to a message from a colleague asking about the relationship between Lean, Six Sigma and Quality, I wrote the following: Both Lean and Six Sigma (and Lean Six Sigma, the combination of the two) are ways of improving operational excellence. Lean does this by improving flow through value streams, primarily focusing on the…

  • Demand for Lean Six Sigma Skills Skyrockets

    Quality Digest reports that a study by The Avery Group shows that companies flush with strong balance sheets after taking drastic actions during the recession are clearly making aggressive moves to bolster their internal talent pools by seeking both lean and Six Sigma talent, according to the seventh annual study from The Avery Group, which…

  • Hospital Payments Linked to Quality of Outcomes

    It has long been recognized that the incentives in the healthcare system are perverse in the sense that hospitals receive compensation for what is essentially rework. For example, a patient might be admitted and treated for an ailment, released, then subsequently readmitted for the same ailment. Another common occurrence is that patients acquire a problem…

  • Using QI Macros to Test Normality

  • The Dirty Dozen Quality Challenges

    Lean, Six Sigma and Quality provide a set of tools and a framework for achieving excellence in any process.Quality professionals are able to help organizations determine if customer requirements are properly defined and if the organization is meeting those requirements. Lean practitioners have a set of skills that can be used to eliminate waste in…

  • Statistical Engineering

    In the movie “The Graduate,” the new graduate is told by a would-be mentor to remember only one word as he heads out into the world: Plastics. Times have changed. Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google says, ‘‘I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And I’m not kidding.’’…

  • Pyzdek Institute Receives Accreditation

    PEOPLECERT Group, the experts in certifying professionals, today announced the accreditation of Pyzdek Institute , the global online training company, as an Accredited Training Organization for the International Association for Six Sigma Certification (IASSC) Lean Six Sigma exams. PEOPLECERT Group offers independent, globally recognized certifications that evaluate competence, know-how and expertise and are key to today’s competitive,…

  • The Problem with Swiss Army Knife Control Charting

    I’m an advocate of using the I-chart as the default control chart. If I am teaching statistical process control (SPC) and can only teach one chart, the I-chart is always the one that I teach. It’s the only control chart I cover in my Lean Six Sigma Green Belt training. It’s the only chart that…

  • When To Use Your Eyeballs, and When Not To

    One of the exercises I assign to students in my training involves creating two histograms from normally distributed random numbers. The results often look similar to those shown in figure 1. When I ask students to comment on their histograms I usually get comments about the averages, spread, and other statistical properties. However, that misses…

  • How to Calculate Net Present Value with Excel

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