Tag: Project Selection & Identification

Anyone who has deployed Six Sigma, or has thought about deploying Six Sigma, is familiar with the main stumbling blocks to a successful deployment – lack of senior leader support, lack of data, longer-than-expected project cycle time, part-time Black Belt resources, and most important, poorly defined projects. Since the first financial firm started deploying Six […]

A successful business knows its customers – who they are, what their expectations are and what they think of the products or services. More importantly, a successful business continually improves its processes, reassesses its ability to meet customer needs, and gathers customer data to keep well appraised of changing customer needs and expectations. There are many […]

The “is/is-not analysis” can be one of the most useful Six Sigma tools for project selection or definition. It can help you narrow scopes, increase your chances for success and accelerate your projects.

The nuclear medicine department located in the Ospedale Santa Croce e Carle in Cuneo, Italy, has always been recognized as a national and international reference site for its clinical compentencies and innovative facility design. When originally opened, the nuclear medicine department was structured to provide the best possible service to patients. This included a focus […]

Managers must create and foster an environment that sets the stage for employee success. Six essential factors can guide managers toward a thriving Lean Six Sigma program.

Companies new to Six Sigma need an agreed-upon, easily communicated picture of current processes (“as is” state). Building a SIPOC diagram is a good starting point.

When a Six Sigma project is unsuccessful, a common cause of the failure is a poor project selection process. Compounding the problem of project failure, incorrect and inappropriate projects transmit a negative message to the organization about Six Sigma and can lead to the impression that the methodology is not applicable to all types of […]

In October 2003, a small group of employees began Black Belt training to give new impetus to Canada Post’s process excellence movement. Since then, they and a second cadre of process experts, Green Belts, have, with their many project teams, netted the company more than $7 million in savings and revenues. By the end of […]

For a number of years, businesses in a wide range of industries have been successfully implementing Lean and Six Sigma in manufacturing and engineering, and more recently in the transactional processes in finance, administration and customer service. The last business area to see this improvement methodology arrive was the sales department. But already it is […]

A midsized debt collection agency was in trouble with one of its largest clients. The client was unhappy with the agency’s debt collection rate, and was threatening to take their business elsewhere if things did not improve. The manager of the agency division involved had just become a Green Belt and he thought this would […]

When you think of Six Sigma, you likely think of manufacturing. But apply the operational excellence methodology to your sales and marketing departments, and an untapped avenue of improvement projects opens up that can increase sales.

With many companies integrating Lean and Six Sigma methodologies into a single improvement tool kit, value stream mapping has emerged as a preferred tool to identify process improvement opportunities. A number of valuable points can be made about applying value stream thinking to project selection across a range of industries and processes both in the […]

The CEO of a $1 billion business with sales and marketing affiliates in Europe, the Middle East and Africa asked the question, “When one of my affiliated businesses makes improvements, how do I get the benefits across all my businesses without having to wait for people to reinvent the wheel?” His question stimulated those responsible […]

People who have successfully implemented Lean Six Sigma all say the same thing: Having the best data, tools and improvement methods in the world is no substitute for having effective teams. Lean Six Sigma is about leveraging the knowledge, energy and passion of the whole team – Green Belts, process owners, Black Belts and other team […]

Once a healthcare organization has decided that Six Sigma can be an effective approach to improving the many services it delivers, the question then becomes how does it know where to start implementing the methodology’s statistical process tools. Process issues or variability in healthcare may exist around a particular piece of technology, within a certain […]

An emerging trend – which can justifiably be labeled as a case of “Mad Belt Disease” – may be threatening the long-term credibility and success of Six Sigma. It is time for practitioners of Six Sigma to help stem the spread of what is beginning to look like an epidemic. This disturbing trend is the increasingly […]