Improvement Insights Blog

90% of People Work In Service Industries. and 90% of people in manufacturing work in the service side of the business. So why are we teaching everyone every tool they might need on a factory floor?

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

“It used to be that I’d get lots of requests over time for more exotic tools that are in the ‘long tail’ of tools that you might use in Six Sigma. Lately I haven’t been getting too many of those, but I still get one every once in a while. But here’s my challenge: 80% of people in America work in service industries, not manufacturing.

“Mikel Harry said in his book that even in manufacturing, about 90% of the people work in the service side of the business, not on the factory floor making stuff. So, we spend a lot of time teaching everybody things they don’t need to know to solve problems they don’t have to impress people they don’t like.

“I believe that there’s an opportunity here because QI Macros will do most things anybody ever wants. If you’re one of those rare few who work on a factory floor or have to do some sort of exotic DOE: God bless you, go buy something else. We’re not going to be that for you. But if you want to just make improvements in the service side of your business, we can help you with that. In healthcare, banking, telephony, any service industry anywhere. Even the service end of manufacturing, because if you don’t get the order right, you’re not going to make the right product which means you’re not going to deliver the right product which means it’s going to come back to you and the costs of that are astronomical.

“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Start using the Tools of Quality to solve your service problems and I think you’ll find out that you get a lot more money and a lot more customers and a lot more retention.

“Let’s go out and improve something this week.”