“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.
This recent article talks about how GE measured Six Sigma success:
“Engineers and scientists were measured on how many Six Sigma projects they completed during the year.”
Since I know that 4% of the business is causing over half of the waste, rework and lost profit (the 4-50 rule), making everyone do “Six Sigma projects” is a form of overproduction (violating a Lean rule). It creates waste, rework and unhappy employees. It makes people put trivial improvements in Six Sigma format to achieve the goals.
Measure Six Sigma success by bottom-line, profit and productivity enhancing results, not projects. Use data to focus improvements to maximize results and minimize effort.
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"
Many people avoid Six Sigma because they think it involves a lot of math and statistics. You know, formulas. I don’t think you need any formulas. You don’t need to be a statistician. You just need software that went to college and knows the formulas.
In The Math Gene, Author Keith Devlin explores “why so many people find mathematics impossibly hard.” He says: mathematics is the science of patterns. Isn’t that what we’re trying to do in Six Sigma, separate the wheat from the chaff, separate the signal from the noise and detect the underlying patterns of performance?
Creating homemade Cp and Cpk templates often results in incorrect values. There are many, many mistakes you might make without realizing. Here are a few examples.
A customer sent me their home grown template for calculating Cp and Cpk and wondered why the QI Macros got such radically different values. It was easy to see from their data that they were using standard deviation, not Sigma estimator (Rbar/d2) to calculate Cp and Cpk. Use Stdev to calculate Pp and Ppk, not Cp and Cpk:
They had run the QI Macros histogram on two columns of data, one measured at 0 degrees and one measured at 90 degrees.
Continue Reading "Cp Cpk Formulas and the Mistakes in Homemade Templates"
This month’s issue of Money Magazine discusses the 21 Most Valuable Career Skills. At the top of the list, statistical analysis increasing pay by 6.1%. Right behind statistical analysis is Data Mining at 5.1%. It’s incredibly easy to learn these two skills using QI Macros and Six Sigma.
Also on the list, Customer Service Metrics (4.3%). I have found that the written comments in customer service systems can be easily analyzed using the QI Macros Word Count tool to identify the most common type of call or complaint. Then simple root cause analysis can reduce or eliminate those calls.
Business analysis (3.8%) is easy with QI Macros Control Chart Dashboards.
Charles Duhigg, in his book Smarter, Faster, Better, describes a condition he calls “information blindness.” When faced with too much information, people shut down because they don’t know what to do with it.
I find this is true in most companies. They collect tons of data, but can’t “winnow” the data down into the vital few bits of information that would transform their business. What I invariably do is use PivotTables, control charts and Pareto charts to find the “vital few” bits that tell us exactly where to find and fix the problems that cause over half of the waste, rework and lost profits.
I first learned how to draw Pareto charts by hand using engineering paper if you can believe it. Our trainers were very specific about how they were to be drawn. One of the earliest references I can find is Kaoru Ishikawa’s Guide to Quality Control. Here’s the correct way to draw a Pareto chart using data from Ishikawa’s book:
The bars should be touching and the cumulative percentage line should go from corner to corner of the first bar.
Unfortunately, most Pareto charts drawn by computer look like the following one, bars not touching and cumulative line running out of the center of the top of the first bar.
Customers invariably want three things from any supplier; they want you to be better, faster and cheaper that your competition and your past performance. It’s vital to find out what they want. Sometimes it’s as easy as asking: “What can we do better?” and then listening carefully to the response.
One way to figure out what customers want is to develop a voice of the customer (VOC) diagram and keep it updated.
Along the left-hand side are the customer’s requirements for better, faster and cheaper. The goal is to capture exactly what they say in their language. Then translate what they say into business changes that deliver on those requirements.
I have found that a high number of people have a fear of math. They seem to think that you are either born with math skills or you aren’t.
In the Jan/Feb 2016 Scientific American Mind, author Carol Dweck reviews the most recent research into The Remarkable Reach of Growth Mind-Sets.
One study by Kathy Liu Sun found that middle school math teachers that embraced growth mind-set but did not back it up with growth mind-set teaching methods such as emphasizing underlying concepts, giving feedback and giving students a chance to revise and resubmit their work caused their students to develop a fixed mind-set.
Continue Reading "Is a Fear of Math Stopping Your Six Sigma Projects?"
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