Xcel Energy Cuts The Power
Xcel left a message on our phone that we would “experience periodic electrical outages” because they are trying to conserve “natural gas usage due to cold weather.”
Can’t wait to reset all of our digital clocks.
Xcel left a message on our phone that we would “experience periodic electrical outages” because they are trying to conserve “natural gas usage due to cold weather.”
Can’t wait to reset all of our digital clocks.
How to “hack” Lean Six Sigma for Healthcare Quality and Safety. Recorded at NAHQ 2018 in Minneapolis, MN.
Continue Reading "Agile Lean Six Sigma for Healthcare – NAHQ 2018"
The Nov-Dec 2018 HBR reports that Lean, Six Sigma and Agile “always work well initially, but often the gains fade quickly.”
What’s needed to sustain improvements?
Start monitoring your improvement projects using QI Macros control charts.
Download a free trial at https://www.qimacros.com.
If you appreciate how much QI Macros helps you, please tell a friend about the software! Why? Honestly, it’s because we we want to live in a world where more things are done right the FIRST time. Can you imagine:
That’s a world where Quality Improvement is embraced and celebrated.
We’re excited! From adding Menu Icons to make things easier to find (and easier to add to your Excel Quick Access Toolbar), to adding a Search function to answer those “Where is that one chart…” questions, to the Control Chart Template Wizard… we think this is the most powerful, easiest to use version of QI Macros that there is.
This version is compatible with:
If you’d like to upgrade to QI Macros 2018.10, you can purchase a new license by clicking HERE.
Jeremy Singer-Vine publishes a Data Is Plural newsletter about available data sets. I took the U.S. & Canada power outage data from 2018 and used it with QI Macros Data Mining Wizard to create an improvement project.
I used a g Chart of time between power outages. Averaging a little over 3 days between outages.
Then, the Data Mining Wizard found the most common cause of outages to be weather. But look at number two: operations. That’s something that could be fixed. Vandalism could also be prevented.
Next, where are outages most likely to occur:
And what month? Readiness months: March-July.
My water bill recently doubled. Turns out it’s a design flaw in my Hunter Pro-C controller.
A while back, I set some of my zones to zero minutes.
But, if I accidentally hit the minus sign one more time, the controller goes to SIX HOURS:
It was a royal hassle, but I managed to submit an improvement suggestion to Hunter:
There should be no run times below ZERO! Duh!
I had Denver Water come out to show me how to read the meter.
It looks like you’ve clicked on a link to learn about signing up for a webinar that’s already happened.
No worries, you can click HERE to find out about the next live webinar…
or you can click HERE to view a webinar that’s been recorded.
Continue Reading "Well, shoot! Looks like we missed each other!"
The July-August, 2018 Inc. magazine has an article (pg. 22) about manufacturing vs supply chain service jobs. From 1999-2015:
With increasing manufacturing automation, more jobs are being created around supporting production than actual production. Something to think about.
People often ask me, how big should an improvement team be? My answer: as small as possible.
In Fred Brooks’ Mythical Man Month, he points out that communication pathways increase in a nonlinear fashion. The formula is simple:
(n2-n)/2
Where n is the number of people on a team.
The bigger the team, the more time is spent on discussion and communication, not progress.