Home »
Blog » Jay Arthur Blog
Improvement Insights Blog
Latest "Jay Arthur Blog" Posts
Over 200 people signed up for this webinar, with Jay Arthur demonstrating how to teach Lean Six Sigma in one day and generate results, while also answering questions asked by attendees.
Jay Arthur is the author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” which is now in its 2nd edition.
You can learn more about Jay’s Agile Lean Six Sigma Trainer Training by clicking HERE.
If you’re interested in learning more about Jay’s ideas on Agile Lean Six Sigma, you can download a free brief summary of Jay’s ideas in his “Agile Lean Six Sigma Manifesto,” available at THIS link.
Continue Reading "1/16/25 Agile Lean Six Sigma Webinar"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Jay Arthur Blog.
Harvard Business Review (Jan 2025) argues for a renaissance, a rebirth of process management and quality improvement. Here’s why:
You might want to order reprints of these articles and forward them to your leadership. (HBR Reprint S25011)
Download my free eBook, Agile Process Innovation-Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results.
“I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“In the most recent issue of Harvard Business Review (I think this is January 2025), shockingly enough, what did I discover? An article about Process Management! Oh my gosh!
“The closing argument in here from these folks is:
“It’s time for senior management to put process back on their radar screens and begin to sort out how to make it better in their departments.”
Continue Reading "Process Management Rises from the Ashes"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog.
Over 200 people signed up for this webinar, with Jay Arthur demonstrating how to implement Healthcare Data Analytics to save time, save money, and (most importantly) save lives.
You can view a short two-page illustrated guide to the Zero Harm – Trillion Dollar Prescription by clicking HERE.
If you’d like to see a short demo video to see how our software is used in healthcare organizations like yours, click this DEMO link.
If you’ve never used QI Macros and would like to try it out for free, you can sign up for a free 30 day trial at THIS link.
Continue Reading "12/17/24 Healthcare Data Analytics Webinar"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Agile Lean Six Sigma, Data Mining, Excel, Healthcare, Jay Arthur Blog, Lean, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
Over 200 people signed up for this webinar, with Jay Arthur demonstrating how to teach Lean Six Sigma in one day and generate results, while also answering questions asked by attendees.
Jay Arthur is the author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” which is now in its 2nd edition.
You can learn more about Jay’s Agile Lean Six Sigma Trainer Training by clicking HERE.
If you’re interested in learning more about Jay’s ideas on Agile Lean Six Sigma, you can download a free brief summary of Jay’s ideas in his “Agile Lean Six Sigma Manifesto,” available at THIS link.
Continue Reading "9/17/24 Agile Lean Six Sigma Webinar"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Data Mining, Excel, Jay Arthur Blog, Lean, QI Macros, Six Sigma, Webinar.
Purchasing departments are sluggish and error-prone. Joseph Juran used the tools of quality to simplify, streamline and optimize Lend-Lease purchasing during WWII. You can too.
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“I was wandering through my old collection of Quality Progress magazines. This one’s from 2004, it was about a hundred years of Juran. Now, he was born in Romania in 1904 and immigrated to the Minneapolis region at about 12 years of age. I was reading through this, and one of the things in here struck me: during the war, he used his statistical skills and engineering to improve purchasing, budgeting and paperwork gridlock for Lend-Lease.
Continue Reading "Juran – Purchasing Improvement for Lend-Lease"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog.
Here’s three simple signs that you need Lean Six Sigma.
“Hi, this is Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and the QI Macros [software].
“There’s three clear signs that you need Six Sigma.
“[1:] First off, you spend more time fixing stuff than you do actually making stuff.
“[2:] Customer complaints have risen to an all-time high and you spend too much time dealing with that.
“[3:] You spend more time mending fences than plowing new fields. You know, that’s a clue that these tools can help you.
“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week.
Continue Reading "Three Signs that You Need Lean Six Sigma"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog.
Most people think Quality Improvement is hard. It’s not. It’s surprisingly easy. Here’s why:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“I think too many people spend a lot of time pretending that Quality Improvement is hard; it’s not, right? You’re either out of control but you might be in spec, or you might be in spec and out of control, or… in control and out of spec, or you can be in control and in spec. That’s not too hard.
“You know, with a handful of tools you can solve most of the problems involving defects, mistakes, errors.
Continue Reading "Quality Improvement is Not Hard"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog.
Most quality improvement professionals have long forgotten how hard it was to learn QI. What if you could help newbies overcome the frustration barrier?
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and the QI Macros [software].
“I was out at the American Society for Quality conference last week in scenic Philadelphia. One of the things that I’ve noticed is when we talk to people, most people forget how hard it was initially to get through the frustration barrier to learn Quality when they began. They forget how hard it is. Just like childbirth, women forget how much it hurt; they just… “Oh, yeah, I got a baby.”
Continue Reading "Overcome the Frustration Barrier"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog, QI Macros.
Most people are still using Excel line, bar and pie charts instead of the tools of quality. How can you expect to achieve Zero Defects or Zero Harm without control charts, Pareto charts, histograms and fishbones?
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and the QI Macros [software].
“I keep going to these conferences and looking at all these improvement posters, and people have these line charts with trend lines. Those trend lines are like fake news. They’re not true. You can’t tell if it means there was an improvement one way or the other.
Continue Reading "Are You Using the Tools of Quality?"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog.
If you’re creating every process in your business from scratch, you may be wasting time and missing opportunities to make your system mistake-proof. Here’s what I mean:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“Way back when I was at Bell Laboratories, we were building a new software system that scheduled how many transmission lines ran between point A and point B all over the country. The problem was we had a lot to do and very little time to do it in, and so we started working on what I call “reuse,” which is where you create something but then it can be reused endlessly.
Continue Reading "Make Something Reusable!"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog.
