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Many Six Sigma practitioners have asked how the Supply-Chain Operations Reference model, or SCOR®, relate to Six Sigma and Lean. However, perhaps a more relevant question should be, “How can Six Sigma and Lean make a SCOR model more effective?” SCOR, a trademark of the Supply-Chain Council, consists of several hierarchal levels. These are shown […]

Six Sigma Directory

iSixSigma Announces Alliance with Global Provider of Six Sigma Conferences

Coaching software Six Sigma is always a challenge. Coaches must help to get concepts taught and ingrained, to find the right projects to provide the broadest experience, and to balance the participants’ “real job” with Six Sigma study and work.

In many Six Sigma projects, practitioners use traditional voice-of-the-customer techniques to find the specifications clients seek. But to get the full picture, they should also try a set of data-gathering methods known as corporate ethnography.

Despite a new lab, Ephrata Community Hospital faced the challenge of meeting the goal of a 60-minute turnaround time for all stat labs. Thus the lab management team chose to learn to use the Lean methodology to improve its lab processes.

In order to successfully deliver service to customers, satisfy them and increase the likelihood of future business, transactional companies can make good use of the 5S tool as a basic framework to manage workplace dynamics.

Six Sigma “intelligence” – the information that helps practitioners pick projects more effectively, achieve results faster and reach long-term success – comes from collecting actionable data through voice-of-the-customer research.

“Introduction to Sales Process Improvement” Book Released

$300K Typical Gain From Design for Six Sigma Projects

Business process improvements, the grail of any company’s operations, translate directly into better profits by cutting costs and increasing competitiveness at the same time. In many cases, business process improvements have accelerating cumulative effects on company profits. If an insurance company, for example, can underwrite policies faster or settle claims faster, it is providing better […]

Fear of statistics is often a barrier to learning and applying Six Sigma methods. One way to minimize this fear is to remember that only three things can be done with statistics – describe, compare and relate. Many people are skeptical when they first hear this statement. “It couldn’t be that simple,” they think. However, […]

Armstrong Receives Inaugural Higher Gear Award

Juran Institute & Wexi, Inc. of South Korea Sign Strategic Alliance Agreement

The business world keeps revisiting the concept of a high-performance organization, often coining some new phrase or slogan to describe it. Regardless of its newest label or the guru touting its latest incarnation, high performance has virtually always meant achieving a hard-to-sustain combination of six critical elements: High profitability World-class service Accountability Simple workflow Customer-centered […]

CHARTrunner® Control Chart Summary Saves Time, Enhances Analysis

Look around a company that has been using Lean Six Sigma for awhile. Listen to the kinds of stories that circulate. Which people are mentioned the most? Likely it is the Black Belt who led a project that saved a million dollars or created a whole new market for a product. Or the Master Black […]

Let Excel Partnership teach you to Implement Six Sigma Methodology and Become a Six Sigma Black Belt

This pocket-sized resource will assist automotive suppliers in meeting an upcoming deadline to comply with a new international technical specification for quality.

Practicing what they preach … Six Sigma Instructors update, set leaner standards and expand course offerings

Last week, the long wait was over for the hundreds of entrants into this year’s Six Sigma Excellence Awards for Europe and the Rest of the World. Following hot on the heels of the North American awards in Miami in January.

Manufacturers and transactional firms share a drive to lower costs, reduce cycle time and offer a diverse product mix as they pursue higher profits and an increased market share in a growing global environment. Consumers (those paying for the end product) want products or services that are cheaper, readily available and of a quality that […]

Human resource (HR) professionals who have a background or education in basic project management have a clear advantage. Being well versed in an improvement methodology, such as Six Sigma, is even a bigger plus. An HR professional who is able to present a business case with a compelling return on investment will be respected. Having […]

A large corporation recently conducted a competition to identify the organization’s best Six Sigma projects of the previous year. Out of more than a hundred submissions, only one actually validated its improvements with a comparative experiment (z, t, Chi-sq, etc.). What did the rest do? The same thing they did before Six Sigma. The mean […]

Dr. Soman of General Electric Selected as First Winner of Crystal Ball Lifetime Achievement Award

PowerSteering Signs Enterprise-Wide Department of the Navy Contract

iSixSigma Names Finalists for Most Successful Lean Six Sigma Programs and Largest-Breakthrough Improvement Projects

Among all industries, upscale hospitality must rank near the top in its attention to customers. Because guest expectations are high, quality is not just a goal, it is the very essence of the business. With nearly 1,000 properties scattered across the globe, Starwood Hotels and Resorts owns some of the world’s most recognizable hospitality brands […]

When the vice president for sales calls a Black Belt in to talk about sales, the natural inclination for the Six Sigma practitioner is to look for the “pain points” and work with a team to define the problem and build a solution. This approach will help transform the sales process, but it may not […]

When attending a performance by a symphony orchestra, the audience witnesses a tightly coupled, highly predictable process executed by a high-functioning multifunctional team. This is exactly how product development should be executed. Many similarities exist between an orchestra and the product development process. An orchestra’s “product” is delivered during the performance. The product is the […]

“Change is inevitable. In a progressive country change is constant.” Substitute “company” for “country,” and most people in modern organizations will nod and sigh deeply (although not many will know that the quotation is from British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli – and that it was uttered back in 1867). Change is inevitable – in pursuit of better […]

The gage R&R study is the standard tool in the Six Sigma process improvement methodology to evaluate the adequacy of a measurement system with regard to measurement variability. While it is well established and widely used in the discrete manufacturing industry, it is less useful in process industries where the nature of measurements is different, […]

Retention is a behavior. Satisfaction is a feeling. Loyalty is a measure of the potential for retention. One health plan organization has used the analysis of a simple voice of the customer (VOC) survey to find the drivers and the relationship between loyalty and retention. While a health plan has many opportunities to improve operational […]

As is true throughout virtually all areas of business across diverse industry sectors, Lean Six Sigma principles and practices applied to research and development (R&D) and product development in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries have a dramatic effect on reducing cycle times and the cost of developing new technologies, products, and protocols for research and […]

New Book Release: “What is Six Sigma Process Management?” By Rowland Hayler of Pivotal Resources and Michael Nichols of American Express

How does a company measure the effectiveness of a Six Sigma program? Common metrics include: time to the break-even point for the program, project completion rate, total and average financial value of completed Six Sigma projects, and average project completion time. The common element in all these metrics is that they rely on the effectiveness […]

Instantis Releases New EnterpriseTrack 4.0 Solution

The analysis of variance (ANOVA) procedure is conducted during the Analyze phase of a Six Sigma project. Assessing results from an ANOVA table can present a challenge making it difficult to understand precisely what conclusions to draw. However, there is an easy way for Master Black Belts to explain to their charges the ANOVA procedure. […]

George Group Signs on with Decisioneering’s Six Sigma Partner Program

It is a common problem. Every year, hospitals lose millions of dollars when items used in the course of a patient’s care somehow slip through the system without ever being charged or reimbursed. At Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, a Six Sigma project team decided to look at the opportunities related to patient charge capture. […]

The term “business process management” (BPM) is often encountered in conjunction with Six Sigma and Lean initiatives. Typically it refers to identification of core business processes, assignment of process ownership and definition of measures (and perhaps benchmarks) that indicate the health of a particular process. These measures are often influential in selection of Six Sigma […]

Initially Six Sigma process improvement projects followed four phases: Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control. Today, some companies still omit the Define phase because a project’s definition is seen as mainly management work. Following this logic, the same might be true for Control: ensuring that the process improvements are implemented and monitored is only a business […]

MoreSteam.com Launches New Project Management Course, and Awards PDUs

How much can Black Belts save your company? This research benchmarks over 800 company data points and shares the hard and soft savings being achieved around the world.

Organizational Culture – Exclusive iSixSigma Magazine Research

While most Six Sigma project charters address a fairly standard list of issues, two areas critical to the long-term success of projects should be added — how a project might detract from or add to the value a company is providing to its customers.

Effect teamwork does not happen by magic. Becoming a better Six Sigma project team – no matter what the starting point – only takes a little discipline and a lot of practice. Here are some principles help provide the needed structure

Process improvement teams at Virtua Health system’s 95-bed Virtua West Jersey Hospital Berlin achieve notable results by using Lean to make visual and operational improvements in the emergency department, operating room and central sterile supply.

Finalists Announced for Prestigious 2006 Six Sigma Excellence Awards