Improvement Insights Blog

There are at least four ways to save $5,000 quickly with QI Macros, not including all of the improvements you can make. Here’s how:

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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software]. I want to give you some ideas about how you could save $5,000 for your company.

“First off, if you’re using Minitab, they increased their price to $1,850 a year. Over a three-year period, that’s over $5,500. Right now, you could buy QI Macros for under $400 and save $5,000. Now, I’m not saying Minitab is a bad product. No, it’s a great product. I just think it’s overkill for most Quality Improvement folks.

“Now, we also have a lot of Black Belts and Master Black Belts who say, “Hey, we love QI Macros and we use it most of the time and every once in a while we have to fall back and pull out Minitab to do something exotic like a special DOE or something. But then we have to remember how to use the thing and that takes a little while.” What we’ve found, and what these people have found, is that QI Macros makes them wickedly more productive when they’re in Excel. That alone is worth $5,000 because your Black Belts are not cheap.

“Now there’s a dirty little secret nobody talks about: In DMAIC the last step is the Control phase, which you’re going to need control charts for. I can tell you, based on everything everybody tells me, nobody but nobody is going to spin up $1,850 a year so that somebody on a team can refresh a chart every so often, a control chart. You could give those people QI Macros for less than $400. For the next three years, that [averages to] $130 [per year]. We find most people upgrade QI Macros every 3 years because Microsoft upgrades Excel every 3 years. So that seems to be the time frame or window in which that occurs. So that could save you $5,000 right there because otherwise your improvement will slide back to the way it was, and that was a waste of time and energy. I hear that too often.

“Now, if you’re training new belts, I believe that QI Macros can cut a day or more off of any training because our wizards (our Control Chart Wizard, Stat Wizard, Chart Wizard, Improvement Project Wizard, and all the other wizards that are in there) can collapse the time it takes to learn a lot of these things: decision trees and so on. In a class that has more than six people, the loaded rate for a for a person is probably $800/day times 6 to 7 people is $5,000. For less than $400 [per person], you can get these people going very quickly, and that’s worth at least $5,000 per class, and ongoing as people continue to use it throughout their career.

“That’s like four different ways you could save $5,000 using QI Macros, and you could do that today. It’s just not that hard. But it’s up to you; only you can decide if you want to help your company save $5,000. Any one of these different ways or all of them. Maybe you could save 5, 10, 15, $20,000. I don’t know. That’ll pay for a lot of stuff.

“That’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go out and improve something this week, like how we spend money on SPC software.”