Month: August 2006

At the Bank of America, Health Care Conference 2006 in May, Express Scripts gave a presentation that included a few slides about their Lean Six Sigma program. Their value proposition: “To reduce pharmacy costs, without compromising health outcomes, while maximizing patient satisfaction.” Lean and Six Sigma together are part of how they are giving “value” […]

Nayism 31: “Of course I’m on board with Six Sigma. What’s not to like about it?” Fact or Fiction? Is this leader a genuine believer or a shrouded figure from the “dark side”? How can you tell? Here’s what I say . . . As spoken by the true master Yoda, “Find the answer to the […]

As a division of Brunswick Corporation, Mercury Marine recently completed their 1,000th Lean Six Sigma project. BYM News reported this morning on this significant milestone and shared more insight into Mercury’s deployment: “Since (Patrick C. Mackey) launched the cultural transformation of Mercury three years ago, nearly 700 management and production employees have been formally trained […]

I continue to be amazed at the creativity some people have. I’ve even heard some staff boast that they were “The Kings and Queens of Workarounds” because they knew how to get things done through back channels, crisis management, and personal connections that were never listed in any procedure manual. They are too busy to […]

A Black Belt friend of mine was telling me about deployment in his company. I listened to his problems patiently and then said to him, “It looks like you have employed a ‘bunch’ of Black Belts who are brilliant at the statistics, but when it comes to facilitating a project team, who might for example […]

Peter Abilla is conducting an interview with Mary Poppendieck, a thought leader in the Agile/Lean for software development space, over at his blog. Pete has invited all interested to submit their own questions to Mary via the comments section of his post, Interview with Mary Poppendieck. This is your chance to ask a guruyour questions […]

In my last blog I asked readers to comment on the core reasons for project failure. Well having waded through the flood of 10 responses (thank you all) here is what you said. Projects were split 50:50 between manufacturing and transactional with improving satisfaction levels and reducing costs the main objectives. But what I was […]

In my opinion, one of the key questions to answer when planning a deployment is whether the Black Belt role should be full-time. While this sounds like a reasonable question to some, many experienced Six Sigma folks find it strange to even ask, because in the majority of programs the Black Belt role is automatically […]

Having worked a couple of projects combining Lean, Six Sigma, and Theory of Constraints over the past year or so, I’ve often been asked how these methodologies work together.This is still a point of great debate amongst the hardliners but generally I find most practitioners are open to learning and applying tools that improve business […]

Noteworthy Six Sigma news this week… Even Six Sigma couldn’t save Sony or Dell from the recent battery recall. A handful of exploding batteries out of more than 4 million manufactured is better than Six Sigma…but some products just require perfection. Flights, medical procedures, and now laptop batteries… The Six Sigma methodology is credited with […]

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As the academic year begins our Six Sigma team has met, created a new team charter, and began accumulating a list of projects that we would like to try this year. Our team named “Gravy” (gravy, or Six Sigma, being the goal of the team) fits in our planning objective: “More Six Sigma projects to […]

Thank you to everyone who contributes thoughts, suggestions and comments to iSixSigma on how we can improve what we provide. We’re constantly making improvements to our technologies as a result. Our Discussion Forum is a popular Six Sigma-related destination on the Internet. Since our inception in May 2000, we’ve had about 94,000 postings. People have […]

I recently participated in a great discussion with a group of Black Belts in my SSBB exam review class. We were talking aboutthe importance of “walking the process” to understand it. Several BBs had the experience of managers trying to create a process map in a back room somewhere – these managers swore that their […]

So why did Jack implement Six Sigma? Larry Bossidy. Why do thousands of other companies use the methodology? They’ve seen it work and they want to emulate successful companies. Such is the case with Lopez Foods. They are on a quest for growth, and how do they plan to achieve it? They benchmark the best […]

I have recently moved to the east of England (Norwich) and one of the first things I did was join the library. Now, every library I have used had a simple process for borrowing books. The book details are recorded and the return date stamped at the front of the book. Sound straightforward? Well not […]

In my last post, about a recent Rapid Improvement Event (RIE, sometimes called a kaizen event), I mentioned that there were three Black Belts involved. I’d like to expand on that a little further and see what you may think of our arrangement. When a Rapid Improvement Event is chartered,alead Black Belt is assigned tomeet […]

Coast Guard Station Cape Disappointment, situated at the mouth of the Columbia River, is the largest Coast Guard search and rescue station on the Northwest Coast of the United States. This area is regarded as one of the most treacherous river bars in the world and because of the large number of shipwrecks near the […]

The latest podcast is ready to download. This podcast includes highlights from the “Compliance and Six Sigma”survey, published in the July/August issue of iSixSigma Magazine. This survey looked into how Six Sigma is helping companies “play by the rules” of regulatory compliance requirements including Sarbanes-Oxley, OSHA, EPA, and the SEC. Listen for the highlights, get a […]

Having spent the last week in a healthcare Rapid Improvement Event (i.e. Kaizen), I continue to marvel at the power and resourcefulness of a dedicated team of people. Our topic was “Patient Access” – in other words, how to get patients into beds more rapidly in a hospital that is typically at (or beyond) stated […]

The Cox-Box is Copyright © 2000-2005 iSixSigma LLC and Gary P. Cox – All Rights ReservedReproduction Without Permission Is Prohibited – Request Permission

Over the past year or so I’ve had occasion to work several Lean projects in conjunction with the implementation of Critical Chain Project Management. One project has been a huge success and the other was a bit of a goat rodeo which ultimately had the plug pulled on it before any real progress was made. […]

Unfortunately, my road as a blogger for the iSixSigma Blogosphere has come to an end. At this time, my plate has become too full and I must make more time for events in my life of higher priority. Currently, my wife and I are both completing our Master’s Degrees. More recently, we have found out […]

Can you help the unwilling? My co-worker and I are completely paralyzed by a group of staff members in an implementation that refuse to adopt the principles of Lean because it takes away the “joy” of working and the group cohesion. According to them, now that Lean has been implemented, they don’t have time to […]