Is Six Sigma Smothering Innovation?

There's no "process" for innovation. People innovate when they're left to their own devices and given room to grow and experiment. Six Sigma, if it has any value at all, is good for manufacturing, not for thinking.

Agreed. Leave the innovation to the inventors, scientists and research engineers. Six sigma is best left to the statisticians, process control engineers and shop floor.

Interesting co-incidences:

- Boeing is one of the largest employers in the St. Louis area where I live. They have thousands of staffers trained as Black Belts. The St. Louis operation, formerly McDonnell-Douglas was known for innovative fighter aircraft for the Air Force and the Navy and cutting edge spacecraft design. The last new complete USAF fighter aircraft they designed was the F-15 Eagle. The F-15 is being replaced by the F-22 Raptor, as Eagles head for Air National Guard units, including, ironically, one at St. Louis International airport, right next door to Boeing. Boeing seems happy to be a sub-contractor on many new major projects, and I hear many of their transport aircraft parts are being outsourced to China. Fortunately for St. Louis, US law prohibits that for major defense contracts. I was in a graduate business (MBA) class with a few engineers from Boeing. I listened to them complain about the work environment there, how stifling it was, etc. Why don't you quit or find a job somewhere else? No way, they all said. No one else in St. Louis pays as much or has as many benefits for as little work!

- I worked for 3M years ago. It was a very innovative company, including innovative manufacturing processes, not just products. People actually came to work early and stayed late because they loved their jobs and the work they were doing. The downside was that with all the changes, management changed a lot also, and office politics was rife. I was young and naive and thought just keeping my mouth shut and doing good work would be enough to have a good career there, but office politics even got to me as a got a new boss in a reorganization who need to reduce his staff and it was "last in, first out", so I was terminated.

- More recently I worked for a manufacturing company that hired a former Boeing Black Belt to start a Six Sigma program at our plant. He completed one project and was promoted to Corporate Six Sigma Manager. Then budget cutting eliminated my position at the plant. One year later, the plant where he had started his "innovations" was shut down as the most costly out of four. (It was also the oldest, with the oldest equipment, while investment was poured into the other plants)

Obviously, I am no longer with that company, but as I monitor the marketplace where its good are sold, I find that the most innovative (if you want to call it that) thing they are doing is less domestic manufacturing and outsourcing more parts and complete products to Chinese factories.

How much Six Sigma is practiced in China? I don't know, very little, I suspect. But one Chinese factory manager was so cost conscious (innovative?) he decided to eliminated drilling four holes in a part he was producing for us to our design, because HE felt they were unnecessary. He was wrong, and cost our company a lot of money in "band-aid" fixes. We had to use the parts without the holes because they were already bundled with other parts coming from China and it would have been too costly to unpack all the bundles, drill the parts, and repackage them.

Sometimes a penny saved is a nickel spent somewhere else!

Before I was laid off, all the staffers were put through a preliminary Six Sigma training course. Not enough to make us Black Belts, or even Green Belts, but a basic introduction to the methodology, if you want to call it that.

The funny thing is I had already seen most of the concepts before in my 20 years or so in Manufacturing, but it went by different names including:

- Quality Circles

- SPC (Statistical Process Control)

- Zero Defects (from the Phil Crosbie Institute)

- QIP (Quality Improvement Process)

- TQM (Total Quality Management)

- World Class Manufacturing

- Japanese Manufacturing Techniques

There were many good and useful tools for Quality and Productivity improvements in these programs. However, what I did not see in them, and what I did see in Six Sigma was a lot of "busy work", required to "analyze the organization" which distracted staffers from their main jobs, rather than giving them tools to do these jobs better. If you have a dedicated Six Sigma staff, I could see there being some benefit, but would the benefits outweigh the cost, or is this just typical corporate executives buying into the "flavor-of-the-month" and the latest buzz-words in management philosophy?

Time will tell, and apparently BusinessWeek, too!

While I have been out of the industry for nearly a decade now it is certainly a problem that I have been aware of. When I first started in engineering in the second half of the 1970s for a multinational but primarily American company the place was run from top to bottom by engineers that had worked in the industry there entire lives and many of whom had worked their whole careers within that company. There was a sort of mission statement that went along the lines that since only about 1 in a 100 ideas bears fruit all engineers are expected to have at least 2 bad ideas by lunch time.

It is very true and there are many dead ends that can only be ruled out as possible innovations by the good old method of suck it an see.

However, slowly at first but with increasing pace, the management began to be sourced from outside with so called professional managers that were not engineers, rather than internally from the engineers that had come up through the ranks. Mission statements like these then started to appear:

• "Don't give me problems give me answers."
• "Failure is not an option."

The result was that engineers that had ideas that turned out to be dead ends were criticized for wasting time and unless you could account for all your working hours with some form of measurably profitable work you got hauled over the coals. The result ended up causing everybody wasting about 20% of their time accounting for their time and justifying what they had done.

The result was a massive reduction in overall productivity, a complete shutdown of lateral thinking. New ideas were kept secret and never got properly investigated because if they didn't turn out to be workable you would have no way of justifying your time and effort and would be in serious trouble.

A classic example that I came across at another place I worked was how they kept a record of the hours everybody worked. Even though every single one of the 3,000 employees had access to a computer everybody was forced to manually fill out a very complex time sheet that had at 8 separate times recorded for each day. Now, adding and subtracting times is something that people do not do very well and nearly every time sheet would have some sort of arithmetical error and therefore would need to be returned to the employee and since no corrections were allowed on time sheets they were forced to start all over again. Not only do you have employees doing the same thing two or more times but then you needed to have somebody check it till it was correct, followed by a supervisor that signed it then handed it on to a group of data entry people that needed to enter the data into the computer.

It was total and absolute lunacy but they had done it that way for over a decade and didn't want to change. I got so fed up with filling out the timesheets that I developed a small spread sheet that was capable of doing all the calculations and printing out a time sheet that was 100% accurate and looked exactly the same as the manual version. This all had to be done in secret as if anybody saw me working on a project of my own fruition meant instant dismissal. However as soon as the first of my printed time sheets hit the pay office there was an phone call from the payroll manager enquiring how I managed to do it. Within a couple of weeks everybody was using the spreadsheets and within 6 months the whole system had been made paperless and data was entered directly on to computers and then transferred to the payroll system when approved.

The saving in time was absolutely phenomenal and saved at least 10 minutes a day per employee and when you add that up it comes to around 2,500 person hours a week and that adds up to over a the amount of work any employee would put in during an entire year. However, if I had been caught developing the spread sheet prior to its acceptance I would have very likely been fired on the spot.

Unfortunately this appears to be a global problem and it appears to be getting worse with more and more managers trying to micro manage business and insisting on every individual department being profitable on a very short time basis that if every quarter and some tomes as short as monthly. This then suppresses any innovation that employees come up with and ultimately results in the decline of the businesses reputation and long term profitability. Unfortunately the management that works this way has often moved on to another company and so never gets held accountable for the long term damage.

It's completely impossible to know if an idea is going to work or be profitable prior to doing the necessary research and development yet many managers will not let R&D go ahead unless they are certain it will be profitable.

Creativity is a very ethereal thing and you just can't predict when, where or what will work and trying to measure it is just about impossible. It is also a state of mind and for a mind to be creative it must be free to wander the corridors of imagination and any way of trying to quantify it is likely to result in an environment that is stifling and an initiative void work environment.

Just my opinion.

Reading about your experiences could have been written by myself.

Is it a fact of life that when the company starts needing you to account for every minute with complex methods, that the company is at best 2 years away from bankrupcy?

I have seen it happen twice.....be warned folks, get out as soon as you see this happening.

Just my opinion.

And quite a good one, I might add. It is also difficult for engineers to come up with innovative ideas that might have a chance of success when critical information is held back by management.

I was asked to look at making our Material Handling more cost effective in the same company I discussed earlier (which later eliminated my position in, ironically, a cost-saving move, then closed the plant one year later anyway).

My proposal was three-fold, involving three phases, all requiring some investment by the company in additional equipment, which would be paid for by reduction in direct and indirect labor as well as shorter throughput. I had all the costs and benefits calculated out to the last penny. The first phase had the biggest payback, with the two later phases building on the success of the first for additional payback with additional investments. However, the first phase had the highest payback with the lowest investment, as it reaped what are called "low-hanging fruits". My boss read the proposal, thought it was great. He forwarded it to the plant manager, who had been asking to see a copy as soon as it was completed. I heard nothing back for six months despite asking. I was finally told that higher up management had determined we were not to make any new investments in our plant, even ones with good payback, unless the payback was immediate (30 days or less). Meanwhile, engineers in othe plant only had to say, oh, this machine is worn out, and, presto! they got a new one, while we continued to slap band-aids on our even more worn out equipment.

MASU, Your last paragraph sums it up. Leave creativity free! Dont "box it up" or try to "figure it out". James

I suspect the real problem here is that most, but not all managers using 6 sigma (or the other process control techniques) do not really understand that they are to be a tool to improve productivity, but are not the total solution in all cases. A good diagnosis statistically based to determine where problem areas in productivity exist needs to be conducted first. Most managers (especially those fresh out of MBA 6 sigma training) are given to ASSUME that all operations are operating below top efficiency, which is patently untrue. When Demming started his efforts, he analyzed the existing processes first. I'll never forget what my SPC instructor said about his first meeting with Demming. The instructor was the head of GM's Quality Control program and was sent to a special workshop conference by that innovator. The individual saw Demming in the coffee shop, introduced himself and started to brag himself up. The later just looked at him and stated "You don't even have a clue what your job is." He was right.

He seemed acommon man. Until he spoke. And then, at once I knew him to be a prophet.

Seriously, are we the ONLY ones, those of us who 'DO', that get it?

It is so very dis-heartening.

"How do you insure that a campaign to slash defects does not discourage new ideas?"

I think I'd start by insisting that everyone acknowledge that Six Sigma may be "necessary" for success and profitability, but it is clearly not sufficient. Just look at Motorola, where Six Sigma was invented. They've floundered off and on over the past 15 years, being successful only when they had a great new product (or a whole new line of products, such as when they started building cell phones). Using Six Sigma, they rapidly climbed the learning curve to make that hot product better, cheaper, and more reliable. But when Motorola didn't innovate, they didn't sell many units, no matter how cheaply Six Sigma let them price their product vs. the competition. And so they didn't make much money.

I trained as a Six Sigma Black Belt at Ford, and I have directly seen that Six Sigma as applied to operations and manufacturing can make a big difference in the cost and quality of what gets built. However, unless the product development parts of a company are both in tune with customer needs and wants, *and* aware and respectful of factory capabilities, the company won't be very successful for very long. No matter how few defects they have, or how much data they collect.

Namaste'

Anna

Moose, thank you for continuing an informative thread. There are many good comments today and I feel that I lived through them all. I still think that the Six Sigma methodology has a place in a manufacturing organization, but that one must be careful how and where it is focued.

I watched the value of intuitive thinking and rationale disappear as people were forced to concentrate on the impression made by the dog and pony show that had to be demonstrated each week to upper management.

Interestingly, I recently started a new career in an engineering discipline that is quite a departure from my core discipline. During the interview process my current boss asked the question "Do you see any flaws with Six Sigma?" Oh boy, how do you answer this question and get the job? I answered it the way that I felt; that it was an excellent methodology for distilling data and uncovering hidden processes and their costs, but I felt that it could be misused in its application. In other words, it is a fine tool for honing the process, but don't wait until everything is broken and lost due to inattention and then try to use it as a magic wand.

He must have agreed, or did not disagree very strongly as I did get the job. Will I ever use the tools in this job? That remains to be seen. Personally, I like to focus my efforts on creativity when applied to problem solving when it is applicable. Gee, is that not why most of us became engineers? Moose, again thanks for keeping the subject alive. It has merit when it is not used as a bragging tool or a device to fix continued poor management practice. It is akin to paying for advertisement-do it when business is good and don't wait until business has slipped enough that the cost of advertisement will destroy the budget.

Regards,

Ing. Robert Forbus

Moose and everybody.

The point of six sigma is to drive out the variability and freeze the process.

Once the "damn near zero ppm process " is frozen, you can't tweak it for purposes of continuous improvement. without going through lengthy process validation stage.

I had this issue selling steel to many of detroits finest.

It is the ultimate hypocrisy: we want you to get your process to zero ppm; then we want you to freeze it, then we want you to improve your process to lower your costs so that you can give us further 3-5-8% price reductions.

When you lock a process, it is by definition eliminating flexibility to innovate.

The OEMS create huge institutional barriers to their value chain partners innovating by their chosen method of reducing variability and assuring quality through frozen practices.

Guess which Japanese transplants are seeking innovation???

Several also mentioned the fact that six sigma is about manufacturing, not innovation. Innovation is a totally different set of activities.

Thanks for including me on this one.

milo

One thing that far too many managers don't understand is that creativity and innovation comes from within the engineer; it cannot be imposed from on top. And creativity and innovation, in turn, comes from acknowledging that problems exist and should be fixed. After all, why change something that is working perfectly well? Attempting to impose creativity from on top will only kill, not stimulate, it, and denying problems will only cause them to escalate out of control.

I had the misfortune of having a manager who wanted to impress his superiors by forcing everyone under him to take part in QC circles and submit at least one suggestion every month. To make matters worse, he expects all 70 of us in the department to come up with a totally different idea; anyone who came up with a similar idea to someone else would have to resubmit. So we wasted a lot of valuable time of such unnecessary nonsense instead of doing real work. To top it all of, he kept micromanaging everything even though he is not an engineer and knows absolutely nothing, and is absolutley not interested to learn anything, about "technical stuff" as he always put it.

Needless to say, things soon went way south under him, but rather than do the sensible thing and start listening to us and correcting his mistakes, he forced us all to cover up serious problems that endangered public safety. When I finally left, I blew the whistle on him, resulting in the director stripping him of his authority. Unfortunately for everyone, this clown supposedly has friends in high places, so now, a man who endangered public safety by covering up hazards in the equipment is now in charge of safety and security; it's kind of getting a fox to guard the chicken coop, actually.

Six Sigma or otherwise, the real problem is getting management to acknowledge a very basic fact: engineering departments should be run by engineers, not by people who are supposedly scholars with Master's Degrees and all that, but who know absolutely nothing about the departments they run and are not interested to learn about the work the departments do. If unqualified people are running the department, they should limit themselves to administrative matters, not meddle in things they don't understand. Just read Dilbert to see how the PHB, who has a Master's Degree in Liberal Arts, keeps messing up up his R&D department.

If you want a job well done, get somebody who's specifically trained to do it, not just any old Tom, Dick or Harry, even if his last name is Potter. You wouldn't get a proctologist to perform brain surgery on you now, would you? Personally, the only people I know of who can have a proctologist perform brain surgery on them without any ill effect are the same people who think that non-engineers can perform the work of engineers, or even employing engineers who are totally untrained to work in their departments e.g. getting an engineer with a PhD. in Computer Engineering to do the work of a mechanical engineer; after all, in these people's cases, there's absolutely no difference between the contents of their cranial cavity and their rectum.

I think Ing. Robert Forbus hit the nail on the head with his statement:

• I still think that the Six Sigma methodology has a place in a manufacturing organization, but that one must be careful how and where it is focued.

I also agree with Andy Germany and have seen the same where:

· Is it a fact of life that when the company starts needing you to account for every minute with complex methods, that the company is at best 2 years away from bankrupcy?

I worked in an environment where they decided to crack down on when people started, finished, had breaks etcetera insisting that everybody worked fixed hours. I pointed out to them that in an event driven environment like in this situation there was no way you can regulate when people start, finish or take breaks and they any time I has ever seen it done the company or employer was the one that suffered. Needless to say they insisted they knew better and as predicted it blew up in their faces.

As for DVader1000 statement;

• If unqualified people are running the department, they should limit themselves to administrative matters, not meddle in things they don't understand. Just read Dilbert to see how the PHB, who has a Master's Degree in Liberal Arts, keeps messing up up his R&D department.

Oh boy, how many times have we seen this? The worst I think I was ever involved with was a computer and communications department where my immediate boss was a telephone technician and the next up the chain was an electrician. So far that's not too bad as both are at least involved in things carrying electricity but an electrician is totally unqualified when it comes to high speed data and electronics. It got worse however as going to the next person up the chain you cam across a psychologist then an doctor of astronomy and finally a retired violinist from a symphony orchestra. Even worse, all of them believed they were my immediate boss and so all would try and micro manage everything I did..

I was employed as the computer systems hardware engineer for this group an theoretically my responsibility was the maintenance and repair of some 15 IBM super mini computers. I walked into the computer room around 16:00 one afternoon, the day before one of the systems was required for a time critical application that needed the computer to work without problems for the next 4 days. I was horrified to find the telephone guy and a sales representative from a company that supplied cabling goods, with the critical machine spread all over the floor in pieces. Neither of them had the slightest idea of what they were doing or what was wrong. Since the computers were supposedly my responsibility I tried to offer where I thought where they were going wrong only to be ignored. After about and hour of gentle hinging that they should leave it to me to fix and getting no response I ended up telling the what for and throwing them out of the computer room. I then spent the next 6 hours or so not only fixing the initial problem but several that they had caused introduced by not carrying out appropriate anti static procedures.

Now you would think that the telephone guy who was not qualified and did not have authority to work on the computers would be the one that was at fault. Oh no, because I had to tell him bluntly to leave it alone after he had ignored all my hints, he felt the sales representative was upset about me telling them to leave it alone I got hauled over the coals. It was a no win situation for me and if I hadn't done what I did I would have been lynched the next morning when the computer wasn't working. Management should have seen this but no, they were more concerned with how somebody thought a sales representative from an outside company had taken my actions. The also completely ignored the fact that the telephone guy who was supposedly my immediate supervisor had breached security by allowing the sales rep into the secured area where the computers were. The also overlooked the fact that the telephone gut who pulled the computer apart was neither qualified nor authorized to work on the computer.

This place would have been the worst place I have ever worked. For most of the people working there politics, back stabbing and arse covering was a full time occupation and ended up with them doing very little if any useful work. If anybody did do their job properly most of the employees would feel threatened and start playing politics to either drag you down to their level or get you fired. One of the techniques was to write official complaints about thing like they found your demeanor offensive or they found your presence disturbing. While I was there they had three external companies come in an report on what was wrong and all pointed to the fact that very few people working there were appropriately qualified and that by them trying to micro manage the people that were qualified and doing the only productive work were the problem. But that always received that all time classic management sidestep,

"That's not the answer we wanted."

How man times have we all heard that one?

A word of warning, if you ever hear that coming from management check how your parachute is packed because there is no hope and you are going to need to jump in the near future.

I have however worked with a couple of brilliant managers and interestingly they both had the same philosophy and stated it using very much the same language as follows;

• Managements job it to provide an environment where the engineers they are responsible for can soar like eagles while acting as a barrier to the turkeys that were trying to be obstructive.

By the way as far as I know neither have never met and had done their schooling in different countries.

Unfortunately managers like this are few and far between and usually get the chop as soon as somebody can come up with some sort of excuse to get rid of them.

"Now you would think that the telephone guy who was not qualified and did not have authority to work on the computers would be the one that was at fault."

..been there, got the T-shirt and the bruises......

Did we ever work for the same computer company.......? It feels like we did.....!

Seems to me that corporate directors have the authority to decide how to allocate their funds. They select a balance between innovation, quality, legal, etc. Six sigma, in my opinion, is a glitzy quality control management tool that is currently in favor. The pendulum, however swings both ways. Maybe in 10 years, companies will decide they need new concepts and the balance will shift once more.

The Six Sigma discipline is about defining, measuring, analyzing, and reducing the variation in a production process. That is all that a proper six sigma system can do because that is its nature (a pig can't write novels). It is common to patch a gaggle of "lean-to's" along side Six Sigma (Lean Manufacturing, Just in time, Pull, etc) and in the minds of some the purpose and capabilities of these programs become homogenized into a morass of hacking away at functions not fully understood by the participants in the first place. If an organization has no mechanism for innovation, it will not innovate. Six Sigma is not a product innovation program. Six Sigma can isolate and determine the root cause of an anomaly and that anomaly could point the way to a useful product variation, but innovation is more than hoping that an anomaly turns into a breakthrough.

It is partly a matter of definition. I do not define fixing a poorly performing process as an "innovation". If, however, you are measuring the wrong attributes at a poor level of precision and you introduce accurate and appropriate measurement techniques, that is a form of innovation. In its better embodiments, innovation would be akin to using an enzyme, previously overlooked for this purpose, to speed up the conversion of switch grass to ethanol. Is it innovation to plant more and more acres of corn with the same old technology to make ethanol? Is it innovation if you extend the interval, on the hour-meter, between oil changes in the tractors? I suppose we will find out some of the answers.

I agree entirely, in my last company that tried to improve the quality of the way the field engineers worked, without proper training......just a sixth Sigma manager, who was totally out of his depth and did not understand at all how CSE worked in the field!!

Also the sales team were selling integrated systems that I refused to sign off from a hardware standpoint, (and I got into very hot water with the sales team!) because i knew that we would have problems within 12 months.....

When we got the problems, I was at fault EVEN THOUGH I HAD NEVER SIGNED OFF THE INSTALLATION and I HAD WRITTEN A REPORT TELLING THEM 12 MONTHS IN ADVANCE EXACTLY WHAT PROBLEMS WE WOULD FACE!!!!!!

I even got into hot water because I sent the report to the highest manager (a vice president)in Europe, after lower management said that I was just causing problems. I knew it could be suicide, but I was pissed off by such imbeciles...

Luckily for me, the Vice president concerned took me under his wing for 2 1/2 years.....until he left, then they gave me the golden handshake!!!

The Lord said it best, "A prophet is without honor in his own country", meaning you get the least respect from friends and family, as well as co-workers and bosses, who know you too well! It often takes an outsider with perspective to stand back and appreciate what a good job someone is doing.

Sadly, you are damn right!!

It has allowed me to retire at 59, (I am now 60 1/2!), which a lot of other people want to do, but I never wanted nor plannedto......but its fine with me now.....

Oh dear, I was wondering when the

philosophy would come up. In my experience it has always meant

and a customer base that is totally peeved with the performance.

Then, just to rub salt into the wounds the poor old employees that are trying to do their best without the appropriate equipment and parts end up coping it from both the customer and their own management who blame them for not doing their job properly and efficiently.

I once worked for a company that decided to use such a philosophy and I immediately put in at request as follows.

Dear supply manager,

Pleas supply the following to all field engineers:

• Qnt Part Number Revision Description
• 1 off MWND-001 Rev B Magic wand for repairing equipment

Please not that the previously supplied revision A units were apparently defective and should no longer be kept in stock.

Yours sincerely

I M P Issedof

...and you became the most "loved" employee of that era......but who the hell cares! I know and feel (felt!) EXACTLY where you were coming from.....

Poor management qualities has put down more companies than anything else that I have had personal experience of.....

The problem however lies between the lines here. There are those companies which experience tremendous successes often attributed to a well practiced, logical and cohesive quality program.

I firmly believe that all this could be resolved with the implementation of a TRUE apprenticeship program or similar. My experience shows that skilled craftsmen teach the nuances needed to be or become, well, a skilled craftsmen. Whether in the IC field or one of its many support technologies, or landscaping.

I look back and am thankful for Mr. Battreal, though not so much at the time. He taught us to perform square and cubed roots by hand. "If the batteries die in that damn calculator youll still be makin parts", he would say. Or the moldmaker Skip, at my first job; "Slow and right beats fast and wrong everytime, and if the boss don't agree, leave". And the working lead who said "Some people will teach you everything they know. That's how they want to advance. And then there are those who teach you just enough to get you in over your head and deny that when it get's rough."

Quality for those of us who make is first. A priority. A cornerstone.

Quality to those who review is often a by-product.

At least that's been my experience.

Charles

"Slow and right beats fast and wrong everytime,"

I quite agree. But right does not have to be slow. With proper training and control, any repetitive task can be right and fast.

Philip Crosby Associates (PCA) had (has?) one of the best programs I ever experienced, where the Cost of Quality is measured and the phrases "Do it right the first time" and "zero defects" were real, measurable goals, not just slogans, management buzzwords, or lip-service.

Philip Crosby was the author of the best-selling business book Quality is Free which is a must-read for anyone interested in this area. It outlines a realistic achievable plan and tools you can use. If your company needs help doing this, PCA can send in consultants with an excellent program that will truly motivate your staff and employees. I know it did for the auto parts maker where I worked a few years ago.

You make my point clear. With practice comes ease and confidence. Ease and confidence yield efficiency.

So it seems we're all agreed then?

The accountants (re: idiots) have taken over the companies (re: asylum).

Its been going on for at least 20 years now, so what is the next stage going to be?

When will the shareholders, who seem to be the driving force nowadays, going to realise that their investments can be better handled another way?

In the UK we've seen government intervention causing major businesses to collapse or be sold off to the highest bidder, until now the UK has very little in the way of home grown businesses left, and most of those have accountants running them who only see the business as a spreadsheet with numbers on...

When will it change and how will it change?

Any ideas?

John.

Well, I for one "am a shareholder."

I am not putting my money in Large Cap Stocks, where big bureaucracies with ill defined flavor of the day programs will merely dissipate it away.

Also, having had my share of Battles with the accountants, over my lifetime, and seeing that none of them will ever learn engineering or maanufacturing process control, or even simple time studies and their impact on basis opf their cost drivers, I am completing my MBA. This gives me greater insight into the limits of their tools and thinking, and enables me to make even more bulletproof arguments for our upper management to consider.

I tell all of my employees when ever they have to make any decision that they need to "remember that We are the customer."

It always starts, and ends with us.

No pointing. Roll up our sleeves and get to work.

HAving said that, I must admit that I am a particularly virulent independent kind of guy even by US standards. We home schooled our kids up to high school when it was apparent that the local schools weren't going to be effectively teaching them for a couple of years til the rest caught up. So you probably won't ever see me raise my hand asking for help from the government etc..

milo

I think you are answering, at least in part, one of the Electroman's Q's.

I too am diversifying my skill set by a return to school. And am planning another go when this is up in December.

More and more I see this within the manufacturing community. Those of us who learned many of the practical aspects, aspects that transcend and traverse disciplines, recognize an absence of the ideals and drive needed to obtain 'desirable' goals many of which aren't captured on the 'Investors Report'. Yet, many are. So we go on. Not complaining too loudly. But always listening, always encouraging dialogue. And then DOING. And as the Big Book says, "Faith without works is dead."

CR3

I am encouraged by your optimism. My optimism is for the long haul -- the very long haul. We have out-sourced high volume production, we are now well along to out-sourcing product development, accounting, and customer service. Soon, China and India will finish the job by "in-sourcing" the general management function. It is ludicrous to think that societies which produce welders, machine tool operators, accountants, engineers, and perform product development cannot handle the general management piece.

When the American middle class has the same standard of living as the Chinese and Indian middle class, and all the wars and famines are over, we will see a renaissance to rival the 14th and 15th centuries and a resurgence of democratic governance (currently very much missing in China and India and looking a little pale in the USA).

Hi Milo,

• Roll up our sleeves and get to work.

You might find an experience of mine interesting.

Back when I started as a cadet engineer the managing director of the company I worked for had worked there for his entire working life and had started exactly as I had as a cadet. He once congratulated me saying that whenever the shit hit the fan I was always the first one to roll up my sleeves and get on with the job.

Interestingly some four years later, when he had retired and was replaced by an externally sourced accountant type manager, I was criticized for exactly the same thing.

And they wonder why the company went down the toilet.

Over the last few days I caught up with a friend that had worked for the same company with me. We both worked out way up to regional manager level but found it increasingly difficult to live with the immoral and unjust way we were forced to act by the ever increasing number of so called graduate managers. We both went our own ways at around the same time and while I switched industries he set up in competition with our original employer.

Roughly two decades later my friends company is now several time the size of the company we worked for and they have withered from a company with its own building and nearly a hundred staff to a handful of people working out of serviced offices.

You worked in oppositeland!

At least you and your friend had the courage of your moral authority to go someplace else and add value, not just stay and suck a check (suque a cheque?).

I love happy endings!

milo

Let me apologise i havent opened my CR4 mail box for quite some time.hence this delayed responce.Well six sigma process is a newly coined word i feel ,to be presise it was already existing and was in use and it was known as Audit applicable in any field.like techenical audit,safety audit etc.some smart guy has picked up the word six sigma mixed it up with scientfic leying techenic(Stastical softwares) made it look as if its a grate techenic to keep the share value of the companey high. maximising the bottom line and kill the creative thinking of indivisuals.in fact Big carporations wont even introduce a new product un less it has gone through six sigma process and they are loosing out to countries like China,Japan &even Vitnam.

crm

Hi,

Appreciate the question. As you all know that "Necessity is the mother of invention". Until the thought process is diverted towards that there is some necessity, innovation is just imanginable to take it place. Hence in Six Sigma methodology there are few tools which are proactive tools like FMEA, QFD. FMEA is a tool which was devloped by A fisher and evolved from Aircraft industry where in FMEA was used to identify failure of critical parts of an aircraft before the aircraft left the run way. Where in they used to identify these as risk and were coming out with some remedial action proctivel just to ensure if it happens how to control them similarly QFD is one of the tool and so on. Hence definately usage of few tools used in six sigma methodology will definately divert or create the necessity part and hence contributing to innovation.

Regards,

gvrk

When six sigma becomes the driving force you have to polish your resume and look for a new place meant.because voice of customer becomes a target to kill from very close quarters by voice of business generated by the mad set of auditors in six sigma T shirts. Neither the automobile nor an aircraft could have been invented if six sigma was in force During Henry ford,Rudolf diesel. Graham Bell and Tomas Edison and wright brothers time.

crm

I appreciate your views and points made. Well as i mentioned strongly " Necessity is the Mother of invention " and the VOC and VOB which you had mentioned are the drivers to kill the CCR ( Critical to Client requirements). Always it is not necessary that usage of six sigma would lead to innovation. It just gives a direction towards to think necessity. An simple example is a person whose stomach is full will never venture to look for his/her food. If the same person is hungry then he/she will hunt for how to get the bread and butter. During this process few innovations may happen. I hope this gives a clear understanding..Six SIgma acts as a catalyst or moderator to think towards innovation..

gvrk

I think the point is that Six Sigma can be a useful tool in the toolbox of most engineers and managers, but when it becomes THE major driving force in the corporate culture, and it is shoved down everyone's throat, and the required paperwork takes more time than the primary engineering tasks at hand (OK, I exagerate a little), then Six Sigma can be an impediment to creativity and innovation which are the cornerstones of progress and growth.

The old saying "Don't throw out the baby with the bath water" could be modified to fit this situation as "Don't drown the baby in the bath water"!

Hi

STL engineer No you are not exaggerating you are 200% truthful to real life situation existing , Long live your creed.

crm

STL engineer No you are not exaggerating you are 200% truthful to real life situation existing , Long live your creed.

Hmmmm.... Do I smell more Kudos for my collection? <grin>

No I smell honesty in you!

crm

Hi GVRK

I appreciate your views at least you agree with me that six sigma tool is medicine which might be effective to some extent.But most of the MNCs treat Six sigma process as food and have forced it through the throats of its employees and has destroyed the future of several thousand employees!

crm

How Lean Is too Lean

Companies need to compete, to do these they "feel" they must cut costs, like any budget analyst will tell you. its better to make money than save money (but dont tell that to GM), as part of cost cutting out sourcing , lean manufacturing and six sigma come in to minimize waste , gut mid level management and generally wipe out several levels of jobs. this results in companies which turn a profit but are far too lean to compete. its a sort of corporate anorexia.

The point of six sigma is to stifle innovation, since all it does is duplicate an exactly designed process with minimum deviation from the design standard. it is great AFTER innovation (during operations and manufacturing, supply chain and logistics) but should not be used in the design process (creativity been the exclusive domain of hippie types who listen to garage music and cant fill a time sheet correctly)

I love six sigma during implementation, but it shoould be left out of the creative process.

Tom said: "The point of six sigma is to stifle innovation, since all it does is duplicate an exactly designed process with minimum deviation from the design standard. "

The point of Six Sigma, correctly applied, is to apply data-driven, carefully-targeted innovation whenever and wherever there is a significant opportunity to improve either the yield or quality of a process or the performance of a product. Six Sigma, applied to an existing product and process, proceeds through the steps of Define, Measurement, Analyze, Improve and Control.

It sounds as if your organization has, as many organizations do, gone overboard on forcing Six Sigma implementation past the point where it makes either sense or dollars. I'm afraid this is endemic among accounting-background managers who almost always seem to think that if a certain amount of something is good, more is better. If you think about drug dosages, or vitamins, or even chocolate, you will instantly see the fallacy in this kind of thinking. Similarly, if a certain reduction of something is good, like eliminating non-value-added inspection; then insisting on even less of that thing, say by eliminating all inspection, is not necessarily better. That path leads, as you have so memorably phrased it, to "corporate anorexia"

You also say "it (Six Sigma) should not be used in the design process (creativity been the exclusive domain of hippie types who listen to garage music and cant fill a time sheet correctly)

I love six sigma during implementation, but it should be left out of the creative process."

Apparently, your organization also doesn't understand how to apply Six Sigma principles to design. The proper application of Design for Six Sigma would give the designers the relevant data about the variation inherent in the company's current products and processes (manufacturing capability), the contribution of specific parameter variations to system performance variation (variation analysis and transfer function) and the amount of variation allowed in the new or improved product being designed. This data is extremely helpful in setting target dimensions and tolerances, in examining the interactions of components, and in setting system performance goals. The "creative" design team can then direct their efforts to those facets of the design which will make the most difference to the performance, reliability, or cost of the new product. This is in contrast to the shotgun design methods implied by your "hippie types" comment, where significant design team resources may be wasted making changes that make the product less desirable to customers or lead to higher manufacturing costs without commensurate improvements in function.

The process used for Design for Six Sigma is DMADV, which stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and Verify. DfSS, like all design processes, is iterative. It's rare for a design of any sort to pass through Verification on the first try. Often, while you are analyzing some aspect of a design problem/project, you may find you have to revise the definition of the project, or perhaps the measurement system will need to be updated.

Six Sigma provides a tool kit which helps managers learn to understand the language of design and production; to listen to the "voice of the process" and the "voice of the product". But the fact that Six Sigma tools are often mis-applied by managers who haven't tried to understand how they are supposed to be used is the fault of the managers, not the tools. I would argue that Six Sigma, mis-applied can indeed smother innovation. But well applied, it can enable an organization to target their innovative thinking in the areas where it will make the greatest difference.

Anna

Six sigma is meant for Management of 0organisations who doesn't have any commonsense and who are zombies,who are in a permanent state of stupor who should be living in mental asylums.Its bad luck for organisations who have the mind set only six sigma Master black belts.Black belts ,and greenbelts can keep their stock value high

crm

AnnafromA2,

I am impressed by your articulate and well thought out post.

I am further impressed that you live / have lived in such a perfect world as your post describes. Having spent most of my career dealing with the imbeciles that companies in your area employ in purchasing and engineering and operations and supplier quality, your post is a breath of fresh air. "Data driven and carefully targeted" does not describe any of my encounters with the professionals at Ford, GM, Chrysler, Trw, Delphi, Visteon, or others...( i take that back, I did have some dealings with one Visteon Executive who was rational, data driven, and competent.)

It is my pleasure to learn that at least one more thoughtful and knowledgeable person exists in your zip code.

My life experience finds it incredible!

Nice job explaining the "utopian application" of the current tools of supplier abuse by the Multi-National Corporations.

milo

I am further impressed that you live / have lived in such a perfect world as your post describes.

Milo,

What did you expect? Have you read her bio? Typical auto-industry-inbred well-educated (not that there's anything wrong with that) young executroid, will probably eventually reach her own level of incompetence through application of the Peter Principle by her bosses, themselves former young executroids, who likewise have never seriously worked outside of the auto-industry, or outside of Michigan for that matter. C'mon, after all, she IS a GMI grad! How much more in-bred than that can you get? Like in the military, you could always tell an Academy educated officer, from a civilian-educated one (ROTC, OCS, OTS, etc.). Ring-knockers. Zoomies.

As a former Manufacturing Engineer for Borg-Warner (at a plant FAR outside of Michigan) I know the type. I will guess that most of her relatives (especially parents) also were/are auto-industry types (not that there's anything wrong with that). There is just a certain mindset that goes along with the auto-industry in Michigan that is unique and difficult to find in any other economic or geographic sector in the country or in the world for that matter. More than just looking at the world through "rose-colored glasses", it is more like putting blinders on a thoroughbred racehorse, so they only see the track ahead of them and nothing to the side to distract them from the course which has been laid out for them.

In a way, it is like being a member of the Flat Earth Society. If you didn't read it in Ward's Auto World, it isn't likely to be true!

Thanks for the compliment, Milo.

I haven't actually lived in such a perfect world as all that. If I had, I might still be employed full-time in the auto industry, instead of in very limited practice as a Six Sigma / Design for Manufacture consultant. There's a saying I'm fond of that goes; "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."

I was describing the theoretically ideal way of implementing Six Sigma in a design & manufacture company. I have seen a few groups (but never a whole firm) in the auto industry who approached "good" implementations of Six Sigma, Design for Manufacture, Total Quality Management, etc. I've seen a lot more that fell significantly short.

Anna

Aye, So have we all.

milo

I haven't actually lived in such a perfect world as all that. If I had, I might still be employed full-time in the auto industry, instead of in very limited practice as a Six Sigma / Design for Manufacture consultant.

Oops! I apologize if I got too personal in my characterization, not knowing you personally from Adam (or Eve), but my experience with people of your ilk has led me to those observations and generalizations, as, apparently, so has Milo and others.

I also have experienced interaction with Six Sigma professionals (and practitioners of other specialties as well) from the aerospace industry, which has many similarities, both good and bad, to the auto-industry, and my experience bears out that problems inherent in (if not the methodology, then the methodologists, of) Six Sigma cross industry boundaries. Six Sigma is in some ways a kind of cult (no, not a religious cult, more so a philosophical one) and like many cults, it is prone to excesses, especially of zeal by its practitioners. Hence the negative feedback you see on this thread.

I hope that in your practice you apply moderation, tolerance, and understanding that Six Sigma is a tool, and not an end-all and be-all of industrial existence.

Brava!

If what you say is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), you are the exception, the "one in a million", and so it figures, as the saying goes "Whatever sticks out gets hammered down."

In a former life, I worked with a "Lean Engineer" who was trained at Boeing (formerly McDonnell-Douglas) in Six Sigma here in St. Louis before coming to our furniture manufacturing company. In my job at the company I wore two hats, as a Product Engineer in design, and as a plant Industrial Engineer. One of his "Lean" projects ("Kaizen Blitz" is what he called it) was to provide the set-up people with specialized tool carts which they could take to and leave at the machines for set-up and repair on-site, rather than removing heavy machine parts to the shop to work on and then transport back to the machine, saving time and energy and allowing the operator to participate and learn about machine up-keep and so to be able to do minor jobs themselves. Not a bad idea. Probably one he had seen in practice at McBoeing.

Our boss soon recognized his design inabilities, and assigned me the task of designing the cart, to which he got the credit anyway. After several more jobs where his very small yielding "ideas" required my work in either equipment or tooling design or in plant layout (while my own, more substantial capital equipment proposals went largely ignored), he was eventually promoted to "Corporate Lean Manager", with several "Lean Engineers" at the four plants reporting to him. He did his job so well, that our plant was later closed, citing the highest production costs in the company, and I lost my job. Of course, no one bothered to mention in closing the plant, that it was the oldest plant in the company, with the oldest equipment, and that my proposals to upgrade equipment for better productivity and lower costs were never considered.

Six Sigma isn't something that has been readily accepted or implemented in Australia. However, we have been subject to a steadily increasing number of accounting background managers with absolutely no engineering experience or understanding of engineering concepts, requirements or constraints.

One of the concepts that while not strictly six sigma is the so called just in time philosophy. The concept all hangs on the idea that by centralizing the spare parts holding you can dramatically reduce the quantity of parts and compensate for this with an efficient delivery system. The idea is that the customers will not notice or suffer any significant delays or reduction is service by getting the required parts to where they are required just in time.

However, in reality it is completely different and the implementation of just in time systems nearly always means working with an outside service provider to carry out the delivery of said parts. This makes you totally dependant on the performance of an external company over which you have little to no control and who more than likely have no comprehension of the implications their delivery service can have.

In every implementation of so called just in time systems I have been involved with, have turned into never in time systems and a whole stack of pissed employees that get battered about the head every time they need to deal with an eve more pissed off customer base.

It's a guaranteed way of destroying your reputation and in once case a major component in the demise of a multi national company that had been very successful.

Probably you are aware to insure Just in time concept works Companies are adapting and forcing Class A certification on their vender's and providing more enjoyable entertainment i was an actor and spectator of this joke just in time with Caterpillar India.Believe it are not till to day since 2002 Caterpillar's engine division has not introduced a single engine manufactured in India nor able to adapt and sell a single engine developed at their US plants in Asia pecific market for electric generator application.But the no of actors trained as Black belts and master black belts is growing.Biggest practical joke was they launched an engine at Power gen exhibition new Delhi and asked their dealers not to book any orders of this engine how do you like the effect of six sigma and class A certification.

crm

Wow, I had heard the term "vapor-ware" before, but I thought it only applied to software, not hardware, especially not industrial (non-computer) hardware!

ROFLMAO

By the way, what is "Class A certification?" A Google search turns up many different uses of the term. What is the organization issuing such certification?

Class A certification demands that your organisation should digest all quality tools available on the earth with a special focus on six sigma in addition the organisation should adapt ERP tools example SAP.all your vendors and sub vendors also should be trained in the above said processes.once a unit in the organisation gets certified as class A by team of Caterpillar corporate certification team every member of the certified unit will be issued a shirt with Caterpillar's logo along with Class A certified printed on the Pocket of the shirt.Un less a unit is Class A certified the unit cannot manufacture components & Products to be used by other units with in the country and abroad.This certification is meant to insure uniform quality of components and products through out all facilities of Caterpillar world wide.This process certification is in Use with Caterpillar and i have my shirt with me issued by Caterpillar India.Just before i received my Honours a Pink slip

crm

This process certification is in Use with Caterpillar and i have my shirt with me issued by Caterpillar India.Just before i received my Honours a Pink slip

Yeah, I know what you mean. I worked for an auto parts company that worked long and hard to get Ford "Q1" and Chrysler "Pentastar" Quality certification, including meeting C_pk goals of 1.00 or better (± 3 σ , for a total of Six Sigma spread, or 2700 parts per million defective, or about 0.27%). In fact, Ford soon after upped the requirement to C_pk=1.33 (8 Sigma spread, or 64 ppm, 0.0064%) for most measurements, and eventually 1.67 (less than 0.5 ppm) and 2.00 (virtually zero) for critical features.

We were told that once we earned these awards the plant would fill up with more production lines, insuring stability for the staff and increased opportunities for the workers. When our Plant Manager was asked a couple years later "where are all the new jobs?", since a siginificant portion of the plant remained vacant, he only replied, "Well, those certs just let us get our foot in the door. We still have to fight tooth and nail with other companies who got certified also to win contracts. Without those certs, we could have just closed up the plant and all gone home, because all of our current contracts would surely be pulled."

"this results in companies which turn a profit but are far too lean to compete. its a sort of corporate anorexia."

Corporate anorexia! I like that. You certainly know how to turn a phrase! However, I cannot agree with your next point:

"The point of six sigma is to stifle innovation, since all it does is duplicate an exactly designed process with minimum deviation from the design standard."

Sounds like you may be confusing Six Sigma with SPC, Statistical Process Control, which is very definitely designed to minimize deviation from the design standard. This is a basic tenet of Quality Assurance in manufacturing. SPC, and similar programs like Zero Defects, Total Quality Management, etc are certainly part of Six Sigma philosophy.

Why would Mmanufacturing want to deviate from the design standard if it did not need to? That does not mean that the process cannot be improved, only that one documents the current process, and compares that with any change in the process. If the result is negative, then you certainly would want to return to the original process, and control it's deviation as well, in order to have a uniform product that meets specifications, which is what Quality Assurance is all about. Then it is up to Marketing and Product Design to determine if a change in the design standard is required.

Certainly, Six Sigma is subject to excesses, just like some nutritional plans. For example, the Atkins Diet, a low carbohydrate diet, can certainly lead to weight loss, but it also can create problems such as ketosis or even dehydration or constipation, since much of our normal dietary fluid and fiber intake comes from foods which are high in carbohydrates. Similarly, Six Sigma, when taken to excess, excludes contributions from other sources which may be necessary for corporate health and growth. But I would hardly say that the point of Six Sigma is to stifle innovation. Rather, it is to minimize error, or deviation in the existing process, while research into other processes and new designs leading to innovation can continue to take place. In fact, Six Sigma savings can sometimes generate the cash flow necessary to fund this research through cost savings, which might not have been available previously. In this way Six Sigma CAN even lead to innovation and growth!

In a limited way, Six Sigma methodologies may also be used in Product Design, primarily to speed up and streamline the creative process by eliminating tangents which might deviate from creative goals. Such tools as Design of Experiments, and Design for Manufacturing, are part of the Six Sigma toolkit. Even newer methodologies such as TRIZ might be useful, but care should be taken that the tools are relevant, and do not lead to waste themselves.

Hi STL Engineer Guru

Now you know after all these circus of Class A certification,Six sigma and lean six sigma,embedded six sigma by bunch of corporate jokers why All Multinationals are outsourcing all the jobs to India and China and driving American employees very lean

crm