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Steven Ouellette
If you can’t trust your measurement system, you can’t do anything with the data it generates. Last month, in “ Letting You In On a Little Secret,” we talked about the purpose of measurement system analysis (MSA) and I gave you a neat spreadsheet that will do MSA for you, as well as some data (…
Paul Scicchitano
If you’re like the vast majority of readers, your company has probably gotten certified to one or more management system standards because someone told you to do so.
While certification is considered to be a cost of doing business these days, companies that invest in becoming certified to a…
H. James Harrington
In the first column of this three-part series, I reviewed an interview that was conducted in 1988 with F. James McDonald, president of General Motors. In this interview he explained what GM was doing to improve quality and customer satisfaction. Typical activities that GM was involved in during…
Donald J. Wheeler
Today virtually everyone uses software to create process behavior charts, yet the available software is notoriously unreliable in terms of the way the limits are computed. This column will explain and illustrate the difference between the correct and some of the incorrect ways of computing three-…
H. James Harrington
The world is changing so fast today that it is almost impossible to keep up with the latest trends in your own profession. If you are not spending at least two hours per day updating yourself in your chosen profession, you probably are behind the current state of the art. It has been estimated that…
Mike Micklewright
Can you imagine producing products with a tremendous amount of variation? I’m sure many of you know this all too well. I mean, here you’re trying to produce the same products, trying to ensure consistency, and many of the products you produce have different shades of color, many function…
Steven Wachs
The purpose of using control charts is to regularly monitor a process so that significant process changes may be detected. These process changes may be a shift in the process average (X-bar) or a change in the amount of variation in the process. The variation observed when the process is operating…
Knowledge at Wharton
The financial services sector has been a laggard in adopting lean tools and practices, perhaps because of their manufacturing origins. But those attitudes are slowly changing. As more banks discover the benefits of lean operations—such as lower costs, fewer errors, faster cycle times and far…
Michael Jovanis
Quality and IT executives alike face increasing pressure to implement technological solutions that allow the highest level of holistic control and oversight concerning the quality of their operations. This pressure is compounded by the current economic climate in which companies face constant…
Gain sharing and lean Six Sigma are highly complementary systems that are mutually reinforcing. While both efforts are excellent by themselves in improving productivity, quality, and a variety of other measures, they are much more powerful together. Both systems are based on the principles of…
Stewart Anderson
The 5 Whys is a well-known root cause analysis technique that originated at Toyota and has been adopted by many other organizations that have implemented lean manufacturing principles. Unlike more sophisticated problem-solving techniques, the 5 Whys doesn’t involve data segmentation, hypothesis…
Aditya Bhalla
The Six Sigma journey of many organizations has morphed into “lean Six Sigma” during the past couple of years.
While the fusion of two methodologies has yielded benefits, it has also spawned a number of urban legends on the context and relevance of combining the two methodologies.
What…
Tim Leary
Story update 11/23/2010: A paragraph was added to the end of this case study to reflect the current state of the company's quality initiatives.
Acme Technology Services (not their real name) is a privately-held provider of technology-enabled business solutions. Acme’s retail software division…
Stacey Corbin
You just finished your audit, and your registrar has handed you a brand-new certificate. Now, what do you do to make sure everyone knows about it? Most likely you’ll send an e-mail out to the entire company, prepare a press release, post an announcement on your web site, and so on. But sometimes,…
Denise Robitaille
T
was the night before Christmas and all through the plant
Not a technician was stirring, no quality rants.
Performance charts were pinned to the cork board with care,
In hopes that, their progress, people would share.
The micrometers were nestled, all snug and encased
Protected from…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
After a meal at a local Chinese restaurant, my fortune cookie said, “If you keep too busy learning the tricks of the trade, you may never learn the trade.” When I think about how this applies to Six Sigma, it seems obvious that far too much Six Sigma training is dedicated to the tricks of the…
Davis Balestracci
The economy has become a convenient excuse on which to pin the blame for everything—especially job losses. Well, in the case of quality positions, yes… and no.
A sobering thought: Will the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule) inevitably apply to the quality profession? I think so. It’s time to “…
BSI
With security breaches on the rise, protecting your organization’s confidential and valuable information assets is one of the most important safety measures your organization can take. The issues surrounding information security involve more than just hackers and malicious software; they can…
Jon Miller
For a group of people who claim to practice management by fact, questioning the as-given condition, we in the lean community have a troubling habit of citing and accepting made-up lean enterprise statistics. In fact, I would say that at least 50 percent of statistics cited about lean have been…
WILLIAM SCHERKENBACH
I’ve spent most of the past two years living in China where I have learned much on how enterprise is managed over there. Many people have said that this century belongs to Asia. That may be, but they have a lot to learn and change before that happens. They cannot depend on cheap rote labor to…
Donald J. Wheeler
The four questions of data analysis are the questions of description, probability, inference, and homogeneity. Any data analyst needs to know how to organize and use these four questions to be able to obtain meaningful and correct results.
The description question
Given a collection of…
Knowledge at Wharton
“Lean” has come to mean an integrated, end-to-end process viewpoint that combines the concepts of waste elimination, just-in-time inventory management, built-in quality, and worker involvement supported by a cultural focus on problem solving. Can such practical principles be applied to innovation…
Steven Ouellette
You know how sometimes you think everyone knows a secret that they haven’t let you in on? Well, I had the opposite happen to me the other day. I assumed everyone knew the purpose for measurement system analysis (MSA), a.k.a. gauge repeatability and reproducibility; but I found out that a number of…
Minitab LLC
Kaj Ahlmann (right), owner of the Six Sigma Ranch, Vineyards, and Winery, and vineyard manager, David Weiss, create great wines by applying old-world techniques and the rigor of proven quality improvement.
Some people take it easy when they retire. But Kaj…
Malcolm Chisholm
I have just finished rereading Walter A. Shewhart's 1939 book Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control (Dover Publications, 1986). Mine is the 1986 edition, which has a foreword by W. Edwards Deming. Shewhart, a Bell Labs man, pioneered quality control and was a major inspiration…