Six Sigma Articles, Case Studies, Documents and Files
At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency And Creativity by Brian Hindo, Jun 2007
"Defenders of Six Sigma at 3M claim that a more systematic new-product introduction process allows innovations to get to market faster. But Fry, the Post-it note inventor, disagrees. In fact, he places the blame for 3M's recent lack of innovative sizzle squarely on Six Sigma's application in 3M's research labs. Innovation, he says, is 'a numbers game. You have to go through 5,000 to 6,000 raw ideas to find one successful business.'"
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State of the Auto World by Jim Womack, May 2007
Podcast interview by Mark Graban. "G.E. has been a 'make the numbers' company as opposed to a 'fix the company' company, says Jim. But now GE is saying they have to be like Toyota... 'is there anything beyond Six Sigma or even to Six Sigma?'"
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Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way by , Dec 2006
Brian Carroll interview of Michael Webb. Topics discussed include: "How can sales and marketing apply a six sigma process and what are some problems the process can address?... How do you encourage people in sales and marketing who have tried to create a process that hasn.t worked, to give it another shot and how can you help them create one that works?..."
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The Hard Part: Holding Improvement Gains by Ronald D. Snee, Sep 2006
"In organizations of all kinds, whether they practice Six Sigma, lean, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria, total quality management or some other improvement methodology, sustaining improvement gains proves to be far more difficult than many think... One of the strongest spurs to maintaining momentum and sustaining the gains of an improvement initiative
comes from the effect achieving significant, measurable benefits has on the culture. People like to succeed. When they see tangible results, they are eager to repeat the process."
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Lean, Mean, Six Sigma Machines by Tam Harbert, Jun 2006
"Without exception, each company is healthier now than it was five years ago. Three of them have turned profitable, and the fourth - Celestica - is close to turning the corner... The question is how much credit for their progress goes to Lean Six" Sigma.
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Lean Six Sigma - An Oxymoron? by Mike Micklewright, Jun 2006
"show me a company, even a company who has been doing Six Sigma for years, that has resolved 90% of their problems, and I.ll eat my Black Belt. Does one even know of a company that has resolved 50%, 40%, or 30% of their problems?"
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Applying Systems Thinking to the Practice of Six Sigma by Uwe H. Kaufmann and Jian-Chieh Chew, Jan 2006
The second article once you follow the link. "the Black Belt might have (if there were enough resources), launched two project clusters one to alleviate the call center problem because of its immediacy and a large project cluster to address the quality issues. In this way, the organization could resolve both its immediate problem and the more fundamental problem and stay in business."
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Why the Lean in Lean Six Sigma? by Mary Poppendieck, Jan 2006
"Lean software development changes the focus from gathering requirements to encoding all requirements in tests. It introduces the concept of refactoring, that is, creating a simple design at the beginning of development to handle early requirements, and then improving the design later."
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Measure for Measure by Moumita Bakshi Chatterjee, Jan 2006
"Supported by 500-plus Six Sigma Black Belts and Master Black Belts, 150 Lean Coaches, these teams have implemented 400-plus breakthrough improvements, 3,000-plus Kaizen improvements that enhanced productivity by 6-8 per cent year-on-year."
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Six Sigma and the Mobile Workforce by Lynda Finn and Sue Reynard, Nov 2005
"This type of data collection also helps process owners or managers spot systemic problems that appear across processes. For example, a process
owner reviewing all field agent reports may detect problems appearing in more than one location. Now, a fix made in one location can be incorporated into MTA based systems so all agents will benefit immediately. This type of systemic leveraging of learning and improvement is what generates the biggest payoffs from Six Sigma investments."
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Seduce Them With Success by Jay Arthur, Sep 2005
"And they tell their co-workers. And the operational manager's success makes his or her colleagues curious. Then the Six Sigma change agent gets a call to help another manager solve a problem. And so it goes until the Six Sigma system is operating well in the mission-critical elements of the business."
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Six Sigma Goes to Washington by Laura Smith, May 2005
"Governments have taken note of the dramatic successes the manufacturing industry has enjoyed with Six Sigma, and an increasing number are implementing Six Sigma programs of their own."
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Six Sigma Success in Small Businesses by Praveen Gupta and Barb Schultz, Apr 2005
"Ideal?s Six Sigma journey started with a performance assessment and gap analysis. The assessment consisted of interviewing managers and employees. Management reviewed performance measures, including customer complaints and feedback, for patterns and trends. They also reviewed the organizational structure to assess communication, effectiveness and synergy"
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Bringing Lean Systems Thinking to Six Sigma by Paul Mullenhour and Jamie Flinchbaugh, Mar 2005
"Traditional lean efforts will help you reduce flow time and waste, leading to improvements that will boost overall quality. Six Sigma, with its focus on statistics, will help you deliver a more consistent product. But to fully support your long-term goals, you need the all-important third component: the cultural change that comes with adopting lean rules, principles and vision."
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Six Sigma and Kaizen Compared: Part 1 by Raphael L. Vitalo, Feb 2005
"Kaizen, as a method for making improvements, is usually understood as part of Lean. However, the term Kaizen is used in two ways. The first use refers to the pursuit of perfection in all one does. In this sense, Kaizen represents the element of continuous improvement that is a fundamental part of the Quality Model. In a business context, it includes all activities, personal and teamed, that leverage learning to make processes better at satisfying customer requirements. In this use of Kaizen, it has always been a part of the Quality Model (?Improve constantly and forever? - W. Edwards Deming)."
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Dutch Hospital Implements Six Sigma by Jaap van den Heuvel, Ronald J.M.M. Does and S?ren Bisgaard., Feb 2005
"The first group of 16 GBs were initially involved with seven projects. One project was terminated during the course of the training because it didn?t run well. This was a nice change, because in the pre-Six Sigma phase of the hospital?s quality improvement initiative, such a project would have dragged on forever. The other six projects were successfully completed in February, 2003."
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Got Six Sigma on the Brain by Dirk Dusharme, Nov 2004
"how companies such as Motorola Inc., Honeywell, Praxis, TRW and numerous small companies use or try to use Six Sigma as the means to an end--i.e., improved profits"
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Six Sigma for the Little Guy by Mikel J. Harry and J. Douglas Crawford, Nov 2004
from Engineering Management. "Over the past 20 years, Six Sigma has moved its focus from reducing costs to creating value. The first iteration of Six Sigma was concerned mainly with reducing defects; its second iteration was concerned with reducing costs. The latest iteration, Six Sigma Generation III, aims to help companies deliver goods and services of the highest value possible."
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Six Sigma and the Bottom Line by Soren Bisgaard and Johanees Freieslsben, Sep 2004
"One way to get management to listen is to usa a managerial accounting framework appropriately modified to the quality context."
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Six Sigma Sharpens Services by Zachery Brice, May 2004
"Now this successful quality initiative is revolutionizing not just manufacturing but also service industries, including outsourcing, financial services and telecommunications organizations." From Quality Digest, May 2004.
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Six Sigma Interview with Alan Harrison by , Mar 2004
"Everyone has been trained to some degree on what we have termed the Weir Production System, which includes but is not limited to TPS and Six Sigma. We have created a pragmatic pull improvement system (driven by business needs) where we define what is needed, when it is needed, and how to make it happen."
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Six Sigma... at a Bank by Milton Jones Jr., Feb 2004
"In all, Six Sigma and the other quality tools that have become part of Bank of America.s culture have created benefits of more than $2 billion."
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One Perspective on the Future of Six-Sigma by Roger Hoerl, Jan 2004
Six-Sigma has maintained momentum for over ten years now, longer than many pundits expected. However, the key question remains: how long will Six-Sigma remain front-page news? The answer is that it will remain front-page news as long as it delivers front-page results. A second, and related question is: how might the initiative morph and evolve in order to remain relevant going forward? This paper suggests that several emerging trends will continue, such as migration to financial services and healthcare, standardisation of Design for Six-Sigma (DFSS), and further globalisation.
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Plant Uses Six Sigma Methodology to Improve by , Dec 2003
"The use of Six Sigma analysis tools provides a unique technique for energy conservation project comparison and selection. The concept can be applied across a broad section of manufacturing industries." Dept. or Energy report on an improvement project.
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Targeting Perfection by Tracy Mayor, Dec 2003
"Despite its origin in manufacturing, Six Sigma isn't about widgets; the focus is on processes. When applied to IT operations, Six Sigma aims to measure and improve both internal processes, such as network speed and reliability, and line-of-business processes in which IT has a role, such as how well an online ordering system is working." from CIO magazine.
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Eight Essential Tools by Ronald D. Snee, Dec 2003
8 essentional Six Sigma tools: process maps, cause and effect matrices (CE), failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), measurement system analysis (MSA), process capability studies, multi-vari studies, design of experiments (DOE) and process control plans.
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Beyond Six Sigma by Pete Robustelli, Sep 2003
"Many who have deployed and implemented Six Sigma say it?s brilliant at solving chronic, complex and cross-functional problems, but returns on investments diminish after its initial application in target-rich environments."
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Comparing Lean Six Sigma to the Capability Maturity Model by Kenneth D. Shere, Sep 2003
Lean Six Sigma and the Capability Maturity Model "are based on institutionalizing defined processes, performing quantitative measurement of the processes, and improving the processes based on these measurements. Both approaches address the systemic problems that have existed in our approach to software and systems engineering. Neither approach will be successful unless a substantial corporate commitment is made."
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Six Sigma Comes to IT by Edward Prewitt, Aug 2003
Published in CIO magazine: "Once confined to manufacturing groups, the quality improvement program called Six Sigma is now being used to clean up IT's act."
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The Hottest CEO in Tech by Eric Nee, Jun 2003
Business 2.0 June 2003 cover story. Explores new Intuit CEO's experience applying what he learned at GE. "Bennet had spent his entire career at General Electric (GE) and was steeped in its culture of results and its near-religious faith in process excellence (basically shorthand for the so-called Six Sigma quality-control techniques used by GE and others)."
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Six Sigma at Jaguar by , May 2003
Interview with David Brunson. "There are tools that we want to be using more in the future:
* Gage Repeatability and Reproducibility (R&R
* Modeling using design of experiments (DOE), including design selection & Analysis
* Design FMEA with robustness linkages"
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Creating Strategic Change More Efficiently by Joseph A. De Feo and Zion Bar-El, Aug 2002
This paper describes how two revolutionary methodologies ? Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) and the Ideation/TRIZ methodology (I-TRIZ) ? have been integrated to ensure that new products are designed to meet Six Sigma levels and marketing plans. Originally published in the Journal for Change Management.
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In the Beginning by A. Blanton Godfrey, May 2002
Blan Godrfery interviews Robert W. Galvin about how Motorola started Six Sigma and helped spread its success.
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Deming Retrospective Inputs by Gerry Hahn, Jul 2001
"In my talk, entitled The Proactive Statistician, I plan to ?examine how the role of the statistician has evolved in the years since Deming?s death in 1993, and how his teachings have fared. I will conjecture on how Deming would have reacted to today's environment in general, and to the Six Sigma initiative in particular."
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Bottom-Line Success With Six Sigma by Forrest W. Breyfogle, III and Becki Meadows , May 2001
"The emphasis within this step, defining the project key process output variables (KPOVs), is given to counting defects, metrics and the cost of poor quality (COPQ), otherwise known as the cost of doing nothing (CODN)."
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