Improvement Insights Blog

If a Six Sigma Yellow Belt can save $10,000 per project, wouldn’t you spend a few hundred dollars to make them more successful? What are costs of not getting them the tools they need?

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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].

“I forget that sometimes I can see things that other people can’t see. They’re just intuitive to me. So, Mikel Harry, I saw him maybe a decade ago and he said the next wave of Six Sigma is Yellow Belts… saving $10,000 or $20,000 per project. Now, if you can spend… $400 on QI Macros to help your Yellow Belts save $10,000 this year, how often would you do that? Endlessly, right? Endlessly.

“And yet, I find that the bean counters who control the purchase of software are only thinking about today’s little cost here. They’re not thinking about the opportunity benefit of having their Yellow Belts save tens of thousands, millions of dollars. They’re not thinking about that. They only think about their little bottom line thing.

“So, sometimes we have to look into the future, not just be trapped in the past or the present. We have to anticipate what is possible and then go chase that.

“That’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go out and improve something this week. Let’s spend a little money to make our people wildly productive.”