Improvement Insights Blog

I graduated from UofA in 1973 with a B.S. in Systems Engineering. Here’s my journey through TQM, Lean Six Sigma, QI Macros and beyond.

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

“I got hired out of out of college by Mountain Bell back in 1973 and I worked for them for many, many years. I spent three years on a rotation out to Bell Labs in New Jersey. I learned a lot of stuff about UNIX and came back.

“In my real college career I was studying Systems Engineering [and] Operations Research, which is the mathematical optimization of systems. If you think about how they schedule all these airplanes that fly around every day [that’s] operations research. Train schedules, construction of big projects: A lot of this is Systems Engineering and Operations Research. In the phone company we didn’t have anything near that complex except for the construction program that ran in 14 States; I once maintained the software for that.

“In 1989 the VP of computer operations said, “This TQM Quality Improvement stuff sounds interesting,” so he decided to boot up an improvement program and I got invited to come in and get involved with Total Quality Management. I got trained by Florida Power and Light, and their thing became known as Qualtech at one time. We had great training; you know, it was a week-long training for team leaders and teams. It was it was terrific training and we found it very difficult to deploy once we got back to the office because Mama Mia’s Pizzeria (which was the case study) did not necessarily tie into how we think about telephony, and so it took me a while to figure that out.

“So over the course of time I kept trying things and other things… and the VP of IT said, “We want to improve customer perceptions of IT.” Well, I hate to tell you this: you can’t improve customer perceptions of IT. You could reduce defects, mistakes and errors, you could improve on-time delivery, you could make sure that what you deliver is what they ask for, but that’s not what we were studying and that was an epic fail. So I learned a lot by failure.

“I think it was about late 1990 or early 1991, we had this problem: the building we were in had a couple of false fire alarms. It turned out that they were demonstrating this new cellular technology, and every time they punched in a number and hit send, the fire alarms went off. Hmm… I wonder if there’s something going on here? I got together with the building manager and together we put together the data and determined that yes indeed, the radio frequency interference could actually trigger the fire detection equipment which wasn’t properly shielded. We were, like, the second company in the nation to figure out that cell phones caused false fire alarms! Still, in a lot of places false fire alarms are true because we had 1,100 detectors and it [cost] several hundred dollars to replace each one. We were only renting the building so we weren’t going to stay there that long so we chose not to change that, but there’s still a lot of buildings out there that are getting false fire alarms all the time and they don’t actually chase that down. That’s a little scary.

“Anyway, that was my starting point for Quality Improvement. Once I figured it out, I helped the VP of Finance save $20 million in postage and $16 million in adjustments. When they shut down the Quality Department because most everybody wasn’t producing any results, she called me up the moment I got back to my office and said, “Hey, do you want to come work for me?” I said, “I don’t know, let me think on it,” but then I decided no, I’m going to go out and try and do this on my own.

“I left in December of 1995 and went out and did some consulting work, and then I needed some tools to help me with that. I developed QI Macros. (Kind of the starter tools of that and a Pareto chart, which is what I used most of the time… still do.) So I got into that and then customers would say, “Hey, that’s cool! Where can I get that?” and I [thought] “Hmm… maybe I shouldn’t be a consultant, maybe I should be a computer programmer and build a product.”

“So that [need] came out, and then in 1997 I started to bring [QI Macros] out. Then in 1999, The Institute of Medicine published “To Err is Human” which said that we kill about 100,000 people a year in hospitals unnecessarily. The Joint Commission said that if you want to be an accredited Joint Commission Hospital, thou shalt draw thy core measures as control charts. (Core measures are things like ‘did you get aspirin on arrival?’ and some other things). But that started a lifelong love affair with healthcare because there was some email ListServ (Google was in its infancy)… out there was some ListServ, and nurses would write in and [ask] “How do I draw a control chart?” and five nurses would respond back, “Buy QI Macros.” That was the beginning of my love affair with healthcare, and it continues to this day: to help Healthcare find ways to simplify, optimize, improve and start driving towards zero harm. We’re not anywhere close to zero harm, but that’s the goal.

“So that’s what I’ve been doing all these years, and I’ve also been involved with the American Society for Quality and lots of [other] different organizations focused on Quality Improvement.

“That’s a little bit about me, that’s how I got here. You know, when I started I had brown hair and now I have gray hair. I’m one of the gray-haired old men of Quality now, but I want you to get this idea it was a lifelong journey: I was a systems engineer who was about improving systems with data, now I’m a Quality engineer and I’m still improving systems with data.

“That’s a little bit about me; what about you? What’s your quality journey?

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