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Using Lead Time Data from Discontinuous Processes
The teaching of lean concepts is typically tuned to continuous processes: Day in, day out, value flows continuously from suppliers until the final product reaches the customer. The concepts of lead time (the time it takes individual “flow-units” to travel through a process), Takt time (the…
Unexpected Snow and Two Lean Lessons
Mark R. Hamel
During the first winter storm this year in the Northeast, I found myself, along with hundreds of thousands of folks in the area, without power for the better part of a week. It was a long wait before the lights came on… and the heat. Heck, they had to send the National Guard to my town, and…
The Ear of the Beholder
Bruce Hamilton
A short time after I moved into operations as the vice president of manufacturing, our assembly department made an early and, dare I say, imperfect attempt to realign the factory floor for ease-of-material delivery and pick up. I would not describe this as improved flow because we were still…
ISO Publishes Management System Standards for Records
ISO
In the wake of recent failures in corporate governance, two new standards from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will help organizations to disclose corporate information quickly and effectively. Increased pressure by industry regulators obliges companies to provide such…
Do Your Employees Have the Tools to Succeed with Lean Six Sigma?
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
At a recent health-care conference I had a conversation with Mary, a Six Sigma Black Belt for a 700-bed hospital. She told me that the hospital had only a few copies of Minitab software, which was shared by several people. She was always being asked to close out of the program so that someone…
Working with Rare Events
Donald J. Wheeler
From the perspective of data analysis, rare events are problematic. Until we have an event, there is nothing to count, and as a result many of our time periods will end up with zero counts. Since zero counts contain no real information, we need to consider alternatives to counting the rare…
Happy World Standards Week!
Imagine a world where shoe sizes were not standardized, or where golf balls came in a variety of sizes and weights. What if your favorite CDs didn’t fit in your friend’s CD player? None of these things are problems today, thanks to an army of unsung heroes known as standards. Standards—agreed…
Six Sigma Should Listen to the Voice of Its Customers
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
For the last decade, people have come by my booth at the American Society for Quality (ASQ) World Conference on Quality and Improvement and asked: “Isn’t there a better way to implement Six Sigma that doesn’t cost so much or take so long?” Of course there is, but conventional wisdom inhibits…
NIST Congratulates Colleague on Nobel Chemistry Prize
NIST
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) colleagues of Dan Shechtman, Ph.D., joined others in the scientific community in congratulating him on winning the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Shechtman made his astonishing discovery of a quasicrystal—an arrangement of atoms thought to…
ANSI Seeks Partners, Support for ‘Standards Boost Business’ Initiative
American National Standards Institute (ANSI) president and CEO, S. Joe Bhatia, has advice for U.S. companies on a topic we don’t often see in the news. Streamlining standards and conformance procedures is becoming increasingly essential in an increasingly complex global economy, and is extremely…
Debunking Six Sigma Folklore Myths
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
Ask almost anyone what is the No. 1 requirement for Six Sigma success, and he will say: top leadership commitment. It’s easy to look at Six Sigma successes like General Electric (GE) under Jack Welch and use them as evidence of the power of leadership commitment. The belief is so often repeated…
ISO International Case Studies Prove Economic Benefits of Standards
ISO
A series of groundbreaking case studies by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and partner organizations shows that implementing standards can provide economic benefits from between 0.5 and 4 percent of companies’ annual sales revenues. The studies are based on the…
Certification Body Created for 3-D Metrology Services
American Association of Advanced Metrology
Manufacturing and metrology leaders have announced a new certification body establishing performance standards for service providers and equipment manufacturers in the rapidly expanding digital metrology industry. The American Association of Advanced Metrology (AAAM) “encourages and…
Ten Common Lean Lies
Mark R. Hamel
Some lies you can see a mile away: “The check is in the mail.” “Your table will be ready in a few minutes.” “I didn’t say that.” “This won’t hurt a bit.” Add to this rather long list some lies of the lean variety. I’ve heard more than my fair share. Often, I just shake off the falsehoods and…
ISO Publishes Six Sigma Methodology As Two-Part Standard
ISO
Six Sigma, a data-driven method for improving business and quality performance, has been published as a two-part standard from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Six Sigma was originally developed by Motorola in 1986 to ameliorate manufacturing processes with the goal of 99.…
Babe Ruth and Binary Logistic Regression
Steve Moore
The quote “Baseball been berry, berry good to me” comes from one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits from the late 1970s. Garrett Morris played Chico Escuela, a retired Hispanic baseball player who knew very little English. His pat answer for most questions—“Baseball been berry, berry good…
Moving Mountains: It's About Employee Involvement
Bruce Hamilton
I was listening to Alan Robinson present recently at the Lean Systems Summit about the power of “small ideas.” Alan wondered aloud why so many organizations continue to pursue the few million-dollar ideas while small ideas account for more than 75 percent of the innovation outcome. I reflected…
Six Leadership Habits for Effective Tiered Meetings
Mark R. Hamel
Regular tiered meetings are a staple of any company’s lean management system. The quick stand-up meetings represent part of the daily accountability process which, when combined with leader standard work and visual controls, provide the foundation for sustaining gains, rigorously practicing…
Don’t Create Standards Just to Create Standards, Part 2
Davis Balestracci
Any improvement effort ultimately faces the issue of standardizing processes, in many cases under the intense pressure of an impending certification audit. Ask yourself: Is your rationale for standardization merely to pass the audit, or is it a serious effort to improve quality? If it’s the former…
Don’t Create Standards Just to Create Standards, Part 1
Davis Balestracci
Because many organizations are trying for formal certification, the pressure is on to standardize and document processes. This is also true for any robust improvement effort. Organizations are currently drowning in processes that have evolved over time and consequently become rife with…
Trend: The Display That Won’t Die
Davis Balestracci
Any article about control charts leads to inevitable (and torturous) discussions of special cause tests—all nine of them. No wonder confused people continue to use things like trend lines. But I’m getting ahead of myself. ADVERTISEMENT First of all,…
Planning the Research Study: Part 2
Steven Ouellette
Let's face it—many industrial researchers, including Six Sigma Black Belts, do a terrible job of planning the research they need to do to perform their jobs efficiently. See that guy over there? Yeah, he is the one I am talking about, so you should read this article so you can help the poor…
Making and Interpreting Run Charts
John Flaig
A run chart is a graphical display of data over time. Run charts are used to visually analyze processes according to time or sequential order. They are useful in assessing process stability, discovering patterns in data, and facilitating process diagnosis and appropriate improvement actions.…
Quality Management Systems: The 10 Most Common Myths
Management system standards trace their beginnings to the use of simple preventive practices that were developed and used at the beginning of the industrial revolution. These preventive practices included responses to common problems, for example, ensuring changes are communicated to everyone…
Why Management System Standards Add Value, Part 2
In part one of this two-part article, we looked at the history of management system standards. Part two details some of the evidence that supports the assertion that these standards add value to organizations. A 2008 detailed study published by the Harvard Business School provides real data,…