Home »
Blog » Page 7
Improvement Insights Blog
Latest Posts
Most companies have way too many KPIs (key process indicators). How many do you need?
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and the QI Macros [software].
“I go out and I see people, and very often they have too many Key Process Indicators. They’ve got giant dashboards full of all kinds of stuff, and it turns out that that makes it difficult to figure out what to do. A lot of the dashboards are speedometer charts or line graphs or bar charts or some combination of all that stuff, which means you don’t really know if there’s anything going wrong, bad or whatever.
Continue Reading "How Many KPIs Do You Need?"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights.
Some people want the data to confirm their gut feelings. Others want the data to tell them something they don’t know. Analytical Honesty wins. Here’s why:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“I want to talk to you about analytical honesty. I’ve found all too often, people want the data to prove what they want to believe, not what’s actually true.
“So what do we want to do? We want to take the data and let the data lead us to clarity, then we can take action to make improvements, right?
Continue Reading "Analytical Honesty"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights.
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 Lean Six Sigma trainers do not include quality improvement software in their pricing, because it would make it hard to compete with other trainers. Purchasing is buying on price, not total value. Without tools like QI Macros, the training is wasted. Here’s why:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“Last week I was out at the American Society for Quality conference in Philadelphia. We had a number of trainers and consultants who stopped by, and they were asking us about QI Macros because Minitab changed their pricing to be an annual subscription of like $1800 bucks, but you can buy QI Macros for $350 and you don’t have to keep renewing it every year.
Continue Reading "Lean Six Sigma Trainers are Picked on Price, not Total Value"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, QI Macros.
Even with QI Macros, people sometimes try to do things the hard way without thinking there might be an easier way. One user waited until the ASQ WCQI convention to ask for help. We could have saved her a lot of time if she had emailed or chatted months ago.
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“I was out at the American Society for Quality conference this last week and one of our groups of users came up and one of the women said, “Well, I update these 91 control charts every week and it takes me like a day and a half, and isn’t there an easier way?”
Continue Reading "Learn to Ask for Help!"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
Over 110 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 "5/25/23 Healthcare Data Analytics Webinar"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Agile Lean Six Sigma, Data Mining, Healthcare, Lean, QI Macros, Six Sigma, Webinar.
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.
Over 70 people signed up for this webinar, with Jay Arthur demonstrating some of the software’s most frequently used tools and answering questions asked by attendees.
If you saw a feature demonstrated in the webinar that might have been added to QI Macros after the version you’re using (for instance, the Improvement Project Wizard or the automated Process Change Wizard), you may need to purchase an upgrade to bring your QI Macros to the current version. Send an email to support@qimacros.com and we can help, for instance in generating a quote to upgrade all the users at your organization or just guiding you through the purchasing process.
Continue Reading "5/16/23 QI Macros webinar"
Posted by Jay Arthur in QI Macros, Webinar.
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.
