Tag: Measure

A multinational paper company wanted to reduce its cost of poor quality. The company recognized an opportunity to use Six Sigma concepts to minimize variability in its processes.

Ever heard the phrase “What gets measured gets done?” It gets tossed around when someone is trying to convince you of adding a metric to your project or scorecard. It sounds good, doesn’t it? If we can measure X, then we will achieve the performance we want. It is not that easy. Simply measuring something […]

“Ensure that every measure of performance is pertinent to the achievement of a goal or value of your organization. Otherwise, you risk misdirecting the organization.” –Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (Harper & Row, 1974) Even in well-managed, global companies, the failure to measure what matters can lead to unintended consequences. Consider the following real-world […]

A challenge facing many new CIOs, CTOs and other technology leaders is the need to change their organization’s culture and reputation. Fairly or not, technology leaders are often saddled with the perceptions (or misperceptions) that their team can’t deliver projects on time or on budget.

By Jeffry J. Smith How can practitioners create a rigorous accounting method for measuring the financial benefits from their Six Sigma projects? The key here is being able to translate measured operational benefits into dollars, either in the form of cost reduction, inventory reduction or a revenue increase. The following five areas should be measured […]

A frequently asked question by Six Sigma practitioners is how to select appropriate metrics for a particular organization or process. Considerable material has been written on this subject. This paper focuses on three aspects that should be of interest to Six Sigma practitioners: Why are metrics – and more importantly appropriate metrics – needed? A five-step procedure […]

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” This axiom, while intuitive for most managers and business professionals, is often not applied to the Six Sigma management process itself. For Six Sigma or any other management initiative to yield the advertised results, many factors must be considered, aligned, measured and acted upon. Having been involved with […]

For any process improvement program, effective resource planning is key. A measurement system that will determine the benefit of internal projects from an HR perspective might be particularly helpful in implementing project goals for IT departments.

When plotting data from an improvement project, the difference between a start-based or end-based time series plot can be substantial. Understanding and accounting for this difference will avoid incorrect conclusions and lead to to better results.

An organization is getting into process improvement. Should it look at the Software Engineering Institute’s capability maturity model integration (CMMI) first? Six Sigma first? Or both at the same time? This dilemma has confronted many organizations during the last several years. The situation reminds me of a session at a symposium in 1984 at which […]

Many organizations spend a lot of resources to collect and report a number of metrics without focusing on the proper utilization of them or tracking the return on investment in the effort. In some cases it may be difficult even to find meaningful metrics. Missing the right metrics poses a great risk to business decision-making […]

When first introduced in the 19th and early 20th centuries, time and motion studies established rules of motion that guaranteed optimal performance during a given time period and reduced the number of movements needed to get work accomplished. Over the years, time and motion studies have been done in many industries both to ascertain how […]

Companion Article This is one of two articles by David Wetzel that explore the value of developing a data management plan as the intial step in the Measure phase of the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology. The other article is “Data Management Plans Can Reduce Project Cycle Time.” Understanding data and defining process paramaters (input) or […]

Measurement and analysis (MA) is a Level 2 support process area within the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) process. The purpose of MA is to provide management information necessary to implement monitoring and control of various required processes. Source: Ahern, Clouse and Turner, CMMI Distilled: A Practical Introduction to Integrated Process Improvement, second edition, Addison […]

Six Sigma can be used in every business and every department within a company – even in places where many executives might not think it can apply, such as public relations. While PR professionals focus a good deal of time and effort measuring the results of public relations campaigns, they typically spend relatively little time […]

At the Measure phase, improvement project leaders are confronted with the question: What is the most effective, efficient way to identify the data needed and to perform analysis of the data during the Measure and Analyze phases of the DMAIC method?

Service processes play integral roles in almost every company – loan processing in the case of banks, mechanical services in an automobile dealership, recruitment or new employee orientation in a human resources department, accounts payable in an accounting department. Service processes can consume a large portion of a company’s operating margin. So it is not […]