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Posts tagged "Lean Six Sigma"
I have been thinking for some time that someone would come along, start buying up hospitals and forcing them to adopt the Lean principles of Amazon and Six Sigma to achieve the “science and evidence” that Don Berwick has been challenging the IHI to adopt.
Warren Buffet has the money, but usually invests in “well-run” companies, not ones in trouble. An estimated half of all hospitals are in financial trouble (often because of the lack of Lean Six Sigma).
Bezos and Amazon have the operational efficiency needed in virtually all healthcare environments.
Dimon has a big bank.
They are all worried about the quality of healthcare and the rising costs.
Continue Reading "Hospital Costs a “Hungry Tapeworm on U.S. Economy” says Warren Buffett"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Healthcare, Lean, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
Are you wasting time in Six Sigma on unnecessary steps?
Here’s how to kick start your improvement efforts.
Continue Reading "Are You Wasting Time in Six Sigma?"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Lean, Six Sigma.
If you’re not getting the results you want from Six Sigma, there might be a problem in the development of your projects.
Here are some of the mistakes I see in Six Sigma projects.
Continue Reading "More Six Sigma Project Mistakes"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Six Sigma.
People have been trying to make statistics simple and easy to understand for decades.
But statistics aren’t simple. Maybe we should change how we teach them?
Continue Reading "Statistics are Simple"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, QI Macros, Statistics.
Everyone seems to think that top down, leadership-driven is the only way to implement Lean Six Sigma. It’s not.
50 years of research proves that it fails half the time. Yep, 50% failure rate. That’s less than 1 sigma.
This type of failure is so common that it even has a name: The Stalinist Paradox.
Continue Reading "Top Down Change Doesn’t Work"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Lean, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
“Our evolutionary instincts sometimes lead us to see patterns when there are none there. People have been doing this all the time – finding patterns in random noise.” – Tomaso Poggio
People just need a way to separate the Signal from the Noise.
Here are some insights from the book by Nate Silver.
Continue Reading "Signal versus Noise"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Data Mining, Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog, Six Sigma.
Lean Six Sigma Fundamentalists believe:
– Get management commitment
– Train lots of black and green belts
– Implement wall-to-wall floor to ceiling
Lean Six Sigma Revolutionaries believe:
-Engage informal leaders
-Train money belts
-Laser-focused, data-driven breakthrough improvements
Continue Reading "Lean Six Sigma Fundamentalists vs Revolutionaries"
Posted by Jay Arthur in QI Macros, Six Sigma.
October 2016 HBR article, Why Leadership Training Fails-and What to Do About It, calls the $160 Billion spent on training in the U.S. the Great Training Robbery. The authors say: “Learning doesn’t lead to better organizational performance, because people soon revert to their old ways of doing things.”
Unfortunately, this is true of most Six Sigma training courses. If you don’t apply what you’ve learned immediately to reducing delay, defects and deviation, the learning is lost in 72 hours.
That’s why my Lean Six Sigma workshops focus on solving real problems using existing data. Once people connect the methods and tools to results, it’s hard to go backward.
Continue Reading "The Great Training Robbery"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Healthcare, Lean, Manufacturing, Service, Six Sigma.
Every businesses wastes a quarter to a third of total expenses 1) fixing stuff that shouldn’t be broken (rework) and 2) throwing away stuff that can’t be fixed (scrap). There are four main costs of poor quality:
- Internal failures that cause rework and scrap.
- External failures that increase returns (to be reworked or scrapped), billing adjustments, concessions and customer complaints.
- Inspection costs of incoming materials,inspection of work in process and final inspection and testing.
- Prevention costs (i.e, Lean Six Sigma)
Inspection, failure, rework and scrap can easily devour much of a companies time and money. Preventing these problems is far less expensive, but requires focus and dedication to eliminate mistakes and errors.
Continue Reading "Cost of Poor Quality"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Six Sigma.
