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Six Sigma Project Guidelines in Plain English
Define the project In this phase you will select a good project and describe it in detail. A good project is one that will have an impact on something important to the organization, requires the Six Sigma skill set, and has a good chance of succeeding. To determine this you need to link your project […]
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Tough Times and Lean 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 […]
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Does Lack of Ethics Explain China’s Quality Control Problems
Kimberly Palmer, writing in the US News & World Report Alpha Consumer blog, relates her interview with Paul Midler, author of Poorly Made in China: An Insider’s Account of the Tactics Behind China’s Production Game. Midler attempts to explain why some Chinese-made products suffer from poor quality (when he’s done with this, he can do the […]
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Project Selection for DMAIC | Quality Digest
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 […]
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Study: Ford Quality Rivaling Japanese Counterparts – Industry Headlines – Quality
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 […]
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Is China Doing Enough to Make Products Safe?
Safety is an aspect of quality. Quality can be defined as conformance to customer requirements, and safety is certainly a customer requirement. The EU says that as unsafe products hit a record high, China must do more. I think that there are several issues here. Are Chinese Products Less Safe? According to RAPEX, the European […]
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“Pareto” Misuse
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, […]
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Design of Experiments Examples in Healthcare
In regard to Design of Experiments applications in healthcare, consider the randomized clinical trial. These are simple Designed Experiments. Usually they are one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) experiments that attempt to isolate the effect of one drug across a population. Screening experiments would allow the assessment of multiple factors simultaneously with relatively small sample sizes. Since the OFAT […]
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What the Heck is Multicollinearity?
A Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt was perplexed by the software’s correlation and regression analysis output. The results were pure nonsense. In addition to regression coefficients that were negative when common sense told him they should be positive (and vice versa), some of the correlation coefficients were large, while the corresponding regression coefficient p-values […]
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Must Six Sigma Be a Panacea?
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 […]