Hi Jack,
I’m between assignments at present, so I’ve got some time to give you some pointers. First of all, after working with Six Sigma for nearly twenty years, I only found out recently that Six Sigma is really a management strategy, a kind of Evidenced Based Management. Like many people, I’ve tended to focus on ‘techniques’ and take the management aspects for granted.
Now that I think about it, I first encounted EVM at Motorola in about 1987, where it was called Management by Facts, and was exemplified by the five imperatives. (The number five is significant in oriental philospohy and is also the source of Cpk= 2, ignoring the erroneous 1.5 sigma shift.)
The original DMAIC process as defined and published internally within Motorola by Jack Scholls of MOS 3, in about 1985, is more helpful than the ‘modern’ DMAIC cycle because it is more general and illustrates ‘support’ and ‘control’ between each cycle. The first cycle (step) in Jack’s process was to define the requirements – the customer’s, the business, the product, and the process. The second step was to determine the ‘metrology performance’ and the confidence of a correct decision. As I’m sure you appreciate, the design of metrics and their metrology is not easy; yet it is one of the single most important steps as it determines what targets to set independent of what the designer would like, and in the absence of any process capability studies. Of course, a failure to design metrics correctly would inhibit any ability to detect improvements!
I could go on and on, but for brevity’s sake I think these pointers should put you on the right path. In short, after your company decides to adopt the Six Sigma EVM way the first step is to: Determine the requirements, and then the second step is to: Design metrics with a minimum of a 95% confidence of a correct decision; from which one can adopt appropriate ‘initial’ targets that might be modified after finding the sources of variation, and calculating the process capability. I hope this is helpful.
Cheers,
Andy
.
