Which process improvement approach is right for you and your needs? People sometimes ask me to explain the difference between lean production and six sigma. The question is usually phrased something like, “Should I use six sigma or lean production methods to improve my operations?” Before I tell you my answer, let me provide a…

Who are they and what do they do? I’m often asked about the term “Black Belt” as it relates to Six Sigma. What, precisely, is a Black Belt? Where did the term originate? For that matter, where did the term “Six Sigma” originate? And, while we’re on the subject, what’s a Green Belt or Master…

Marketing is a process. Six Sigma is an approach for achieving process excellence. It will help you improve the marketing process by providing tools & techniques for identifying what the marketing process is, including suppliers, inputs, process steps, outputs, and customers. Six Sigma helps you understand the need to determine who owns the process and…

Last night I watched a great movie, Living Proof, which documented a true story about a doctor struggling to get a promising breast cancer treatment drug approved. In one of the scenes the doctor has just completed a Phase I clinical trial and has to explain to one of the patients why she won’t be…

Six sigma isn’t just about quality for quality’s sake. Your employer, Peerless Systems, acquired Acme International for its technology. But your leaders want more than just Acme’s technology; they also want Acme to be successful in its own right. But Acme has problems. Acme, it seems, is still operated as a traditional three-sigma company. Peerless…

Sometimes just determining which projects to undertake isn’t enough. Six Sigma is project-intensive. Large firms, such as General Electric, report completing as many as 7,000 Six Sigma projects in a single year. Even much smaller companies can complete several hundred projects per year. But this should come as no surprise, as projects are the means…

To make your customers truly happy, you must go beyond six sigma. Some people, including me, believe that garden variety six sigma doesn’t go far enough. In fact, even zero defects falls short. Defining quality as only the lack of nonconforming product reflects a limited view of quality. Of course, that was never Motorola’s intent…

In a recent post Bill Waddell tackles one of my pet peeves: activity based costing, or ABC. Few things do more harm to lean six sigma than this method of accounting. In fact, it is my opinion that the accounting systems used by American businesses are responsible for a great deal of our country’s declining…

Creative breakthroughs occur only when we have the freedom to try new things. Simply stated, the Six Sigma management paradox is as follows: To attain Six Sigma performance, we must minimize process variability, slack and redundancy by building variability, slack and redundancy into our organizations. Six Sigma involves an intense effort to reduce process variation…