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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.
Shunryū Suzuki said there are four kinds of horses: excellent, good, poor and bad horses. When it comes to statistics, the bad horse may be the best horse. Here’s why:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“Shunryū Suzuki said there are four kinds of horses: Excellent ones, good ones, poor ones and bad ones. Now everybody wants to be the excellent horse or the good horse, but nobody wants to be the dead-last, bad horse. He suggests that the bad horse has to work extra hard to learn how to run, to learn how to do things, right?
Continue Reading "What Kind of Statistical Horse Are You?"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog.
The gold standard of photography when I was growing up was Kodachrome, but you had to carefully compose your shot to get the best photos. Then you had to wait to get it developed only to discover that most of your photos were poor. Digital cameras changed all that. The same applies to Six Sigma Charts. Here’s why:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and the QI Macros [software].
“Paul Simon wrote a song about Kodachrome; when I was a kid, originally it was black and white film, but then we got Kodachrome color film that you could make really beautiful slides and everything with.
Continue Reading "Kodachrome and Quality Charts"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog.
Most Six Sigma statistics rely on p values. But statisticians have been raising alarm about the problems with p values. Here’s what’s going on:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and the QI Macros [software].
“I get these emails about different courses that are being offered (I think one on Coursera) but it was one on statistics and it was “To P or Not to P That is the Question.”
“Have you been watching anything in the statistics world? Statisticians think that P values can be misleading and potentially dangerous.
Continue Reading "To P or Not to P"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog.
I learned how to type on a manual typewriter 50 years ago. I still type the same way. Old habits are hard to break. Here’s why:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“Back when I was a teenager, my mother was convinced that I needed to learn how to type and so I took a summer typing course at the high school. We had those old Remington manual typewriters, right? We had to whack the key to make it fly up there and hit that ribbon hard enough that you would make a decent impression on the paper.
Continue Reading "Old Habits are Hard to Break"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog.
