New To Six Sigma Archive

Ask the Expert: The Topic – Six Sigma and Employees

Barbara Wheat, executive director of Six Sigma for Tenneco-Automotive, offers her views on Six Sigma and employees. She discusses a variety of ideas on communications, but her best advice about what to tell employees is: The truth.

Before Deployment: ‘Minding Your Ps to Get Your Q’

What cannot always be agreed upon in a company is an assessment of an its maturity in continuous improvement process and its readiness for culture change.

Communication Strategies for Six Sigma Initiatives

More than 60 percent of change initiatives fail, due in part to the absence of organizational acceptance. Building Six Sigma acceptance begins with the development of solid communication strategies.

Design For Six Sigma (DFSS) Versus DMAIC

Troubled with the acronyms of Six Sigma? We'll help you figure out new product design (DFSS) from existing process improvement (DMAIC).

How to Calculate Process Sigma

Calculating your process sigma can be accomplished in 5 simple steps: Define your opportunities, define your defects, measure your opportunities and defects, calculate your yield, look-up process sigma. This article includes all the tools you need.

Is Six Sigma for Real? Question Deserves Solid Answers

Many quality improvement methods talk about measuring and improving, but what specifically makes Six Sigma more valuable than the others and then, in this case, applicable to IT? Success with Six Sigma requires solid answers.

Is Your Organization Ready to Implement Six Sigma?

A successful Six Sigma implementation depends on a company's culture, and the commitment and conviction of its leadership. Identifying a few simple factors can help determine whether an organization is ready for a successful deployment.

Lean Six Sigma Reaps $20 Million in Benefits for Mass. Hospital System

A New England-based healthcare system is proving Lean Six Sigma tools are not just for manufacturing companies after realizing substantial cost savings in a nearly two-year implementation process.

Plastics Firm PolyOne Reports Profit After Launching Six Sigma Program

PolyOne Corp. — an Avon Lake, Ohio-based firm that ranks as North America’s largest compounder — on Feb. 4 reported a full-year 2009 profit of almost $68 million. The firm had reported a loss of almost $273 million in 2008. The improvement occurred even as the firm’s 2009 sales fell 25 percent to about $2.1 billion.

Selecting Appropriate Metrics

Process metrics need to serve a purpose, be understood, and not be too cumbersome or complex to use. Fashioning appropriate metrics requires knowledge, experience and a lot of common sense. These examples are intended to help the inexperienced Six Sigma practitioner recognize the issues involved and the criticality of ensuring that the metrics selected and used at all levels of the organization are the appropriate ones.

Six Sigma Is Just A Fad

Is Six Sigma just a fad? Should we add Six Sigma to the list of growing management fads? Various people say yes, but those that truly understand and are comprehensively trained would argue otherwise. This article presents both sides of the story.

Six Sigma Q&A

Get answers to all your Six Sigma questions with this list of frequently asked questions.

Six Sigma Versus Lean

In this excerpt from the iSixSigma Discussion Forum, posters debate the differences between Lean and Six Sigma, and how the two can be used together.

Six Sigma Versus TQM

In this excerpt from the iSixSigma Discussion Forum, posters compare and contrast Six Sigma and its predecessor, TQM.

U.K. Packaging Firm Celebrates First Year of Lean Six Sigma

Through a combination of Lean and Six Sigma techniques, British packaging giant Benson Group has recorded a “double-digit” improvement in production in its first year of using the Lean Sigma Lean manufacturing program. Other benefits achieved include an increase in product quality, energy savings and waste reduction, the company said.

What Is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma at many organizations simply means a measure of quality that strives for near perfection. Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving toward six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process -- from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service.

What Makes Six Sigma Work?

Consultants are earning seven figure salaries, CEOs are claiming billions of dollars saved, conferences are popping up everywhere, and yet one can argue that Six Sigma is not much different than TQM. Is Six Sigma just the latest management buzzword or is Six Sigma a Quality Management program that really works? What makes Six Sigma work?

What Small Business CEOs Must Know to Start Six Sigma

Six Sigma can help grow any company by giving it the all-important competitive edge. For the majority of small business CEOs, the only thing that holds them back from seriously exploring Six Sigma is not knowing how to get started.

Why Choose Six Sigma Over Kaizen?

In this excerpt from the iSixSigma Discussion Forum, posters discuss the benefits of Six Sigma and Kazien, and how to integrate the two.

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