Improvement Insights Blog
2020 New Year’s Resolution Part 2 – Improve
Many people take Six Sigma classes but only do one project. “One and Done” as it’s known in the trade. Make a resolution to start making improvements every month! Here are my suggestions.
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur. It’s 2020, and last week I suggested that you go out and learn one new tool in the QI Macros every month. Now I’m also going to suggest that you set a New Year’s Resolution to make one improvement a month as well.
“Set a goal to do one improvement every month and by the end of the year, you’ll have made 12 improvements and dramatically reduced the amount of waste and rework and lost time and overtime and everything else that is involved in your world, right? Just one thing a month. It’s not hard to do. I think people think it’s too hard to do, but it’s not, right?
“If you take some data and narrow your focus with Pareto charts, down to the four percent that’s producing 50 percent of the waste and rework, you can get a big bang very quickly. It’s easy, all right? Once you start doing some data analysis, [tools] like the QI Macros Data Mining Wizard will go find improvement projects for you “automagically,” from any sort of raw data about when something happened, what happened, and what type of defect, mistake, error, patient harm… it doesn’t matter what it is; when did those things happen? It’ll turn that into an improvement story for you, so there’s not that much to [do] to learn all kinds of new things.
“So that’s the future, I believe… right? We want to have speed and software to achieve reducing all these costs and waste and rework so that we will be positioned if there is another recession. (Which there usually is, right? This is a pretty long bull market, but everything kind of runs out of steam at some point.) So why not position yourself to be there and be ready to roll when that changes?
“I’m Jay Arthur. That’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Set a New Year’s Resolution to make one improvement a month. Only spend maybe an hour or two a week on it, all right? Do the Data Analysis, then figure out who should help you with the Root Cause Analysis, and then take that and move that into some sort of action every month, one month at a time. At the end of the year, tremendous improvements are possible.
“Let’s create a hassle-free America; a hassle-free world. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
