Month: February 2010

Consider a power company for illustration purposes: A power company measures their performance in uptime of available power to their grid. Here is the five-step process to calculate your process sigma. Step 1: Define Your Opportunities An opportunity is the lowest defect noticeable by a customer. This definition, of course, is debatable within the Six Sigma […]

Business Issue A multibillion-dollar software manufacturer needed to drive down the total $191 million annual cost of supplying its workers with continuously updated workstations. Both the software manufacturer and its primary vendor/supplier were in the midst of an aggressive cost cutting initiative that would lead to a new compensation model. The initial, first year targeted […]

When DOE (design of experiments) is used for software testing, there is a large amount of savings in testing time and cost. Various users in automotive, telecommunication and defense industries report big productivity improvements to their traditional testing methods. This success is due to two major important factors: 1) focused attention on the usage of […]

From tedious time consuming task to opportunity for improvement. When applying control charts it is common practice to establish the control limits based on the process capability study and then use fix limits on the chart during production. This method is also frequently applied in SPC software programs. The advantage of using fixed limits is […]

GE employees see Six Sigma as “the way we work.” A key component of Six Sigma is the use of Work-out to move from a statistical delineation of a process or quality improvement to a practical solution. Work-out is a tightly designed problem-solving process involving facilitation tools and techniques. Use of this highly structured process […]

Read-Rite Philippines is the manufacturing site for the Tape Head Business Unit, and the core competency is assembly and test. Read-Rite Philippines manufactures magnetoresistive tape heads to the entry level through mid-range tape drive markets, with products such as Travan, DLT (Digital Linear Tape), SLR (Scalable Linear Recording) and SDLT (Super DLT). The Elite Sigma […]

What causes Six Sigma projects to fail to produce desired results, and what would most help to improve Six Sigma project results? This article presents survey results from Six Sigma professionals and presents recommendations.

Six Sigma is accomplished one project at a time. The billions of dollars saved by companies around the world is the cumulative effect of properly selecting and defining business issues that can be assigned to Green Belts and Black Belts for solution. As you may have read last week, a strategic plan includes planning, adequate […]

Process mapping is a well-known technique for creating a common vision and shared language for improving business results. It helped one management training and development firm realize that people within their sales department had been working at cross purposes, and crucial executive-level discussions with customers were not taking place. Based on sales process mapping, the […]

Before exploring the various ways Six Sigma is currently being used, we should set the stage and understand the challenging environment where this methodology is being put to the test, a relatively small, but growing segment of the healthcare industry. Healthcare today is a vast web of complexity and contradiction. It offers astounding advances in […]

It is well established that there exist eight dimensions of quality: Conformance Performance Features Reliability Durability Serviceability Aesthetics Perceived quality Each dimension can be explicitly defined and is self-exclusive from the other dimensions of quality. A customer may rate your service or product high in conformance, but low in reliability. Or they may view two […]

Business Issue All medications are not created equally. Reopro (generic name: abciximab), Integrilin (generic name: eptifibatide) and Aggrastat (generic name: tirofiban) are all platelet-inhibiting drugs used in cardiac care. Each is priced differently. They act on patients in slightly different but clinically significant ways. The key critical to quality issue in healthcare is patient safety. […]

If you are thinking change is the only constant in today’s world, there is more. In fact, organizations are required to deal with and manage dynamic changes all the time. The strength of a delivery system is determined by its ability to respond to changes and meet customer expectations. Changes come to the delivery organization […]

Appropriately implemented, Six Sigma clearly produces benefits in terms of better operational efficiency, cost effectiveness and higher process quality. Perhaps less obvious – and until recently less documented – is the impact it can make in clinical areas such as infection control and medication delivery. Clinicians are often receptive to Six Sigma given its familiar scientific and […]

Your e-learning development program may well be in trouble, and applying the Six Sigma methodology might be the solution. In this real-world Six Sigma – play-by-play – case study about e-learning development, you will learn from the Black Belt what tools were used throughout the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) phases of a project […]

Most likely you’ve heard that many people think Six Sigma is just a “fad” – a fashion that sweeps the world with great excitement for a brief period of time, usually less than a year, and then disappears. What are some fads that have come and (partially) gone in the business world? How about: quality […]

This article provides an example of how an operational department (like a cardiac catheterization lab) can be transformed from a low sigma level to a higher sigma level, and what that would mean to the overall organization. Patient satisfaction, physician satisfaction, reduced overtime, reduced patient wait times, increased revenues and an enhanced quality of life […]

The following advice should help clarify your thinking about software testing and help you improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your testing. It is helpful to think about software testing in terms of five essential elements: A test strategy that tells you what types of testing and the amount of testing you think will work […]

One of the more familiar dilemmas in business today is how to implement Six Sigma in small and medium-sized companies. This is a serious issue because larger companies are beginning to mandate Six Sigma to their supply base as a condition of doing future business. The problem arises when small and mid-sized organizations solicit deployment […]

All healthcare stakeholders, from the board on down, want to find ways to make their organizations perform better. Increasingly, healthcare leaders have also realized they must reevaluate their institution’s culture, along with their overall management strategies, to maintain a competitive edge and keep pace with an evolving industry. They’re recognizing that managers must be encouraged […]

Six Sigma, 6s, is nothing more, and nothing less, than the use of science to solve problems. Scientific evidence that a breakthrough medical solution is genuine is statistical evidence. Though altruism and evidence influence medical treatments, economic pressure drives improvement. Multi-million dollar savings created by “beating heart” or “off-pump” coronary artery bypass outcomes are a […]

PSP and TSP are software development process definitions (some might call them methodologies) that are compatible with a wide range of software development concepts such as spiral development, object oriented development, and various other sets of techniques, each with certain advantages in modeling and describing requirements and designs for software systems. One way of viewing […]

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management approach that originated in the 1950s and has steadily become more popular since the early 1980s. Total quality is a description of the culture, attitude and organization of a company that strives to provide customers with products and services that satisfy their needs. The culture requires quality in all […]

We have heard about GE being one of the biggest proponents of Six Sigma, both for their own processes and for their customers. We’ve also heard how much GE has saved by implementing Six Sigma. This article is not a regurgitation of the existing rhetoric. Instead, I’d like to focus on an aspect of how […]