Six Sigmas Implementation

Very good reply,

One thing I have seen is that the quality program is shaped around your needs wih basic standards. I do not believe all are the same, even in ISO 9000. They give you leadway, so one can still be competitive. But it still is an upfront and continued expense. (or investment depends on who you are talking to)

Deming introduced Total Quality Management to the United States companies and was rejected. The Japanese were desperate at the time to move on to become something more then a second rate manufacturing country. It worked out so well for the Japanese that by the 1970's everyone only wanted to buy Japanese. It wasn't until around 1980, when Chevrolet and Ford were in financial crisis and loosing to the Japanese automotive industry, that a journalist was curious about what happened to Deming and interviewed him. Deming state if the Japanese can do why can't we. Both the CEO's of Ford and Chevrolet saw the interview and hired Deming as a consultant, which saved them from bankruptcy.

Six Sigma was established by GE in 1996. Deming introduced Total Quality Management, then under a different name, in 1947.

Toyota took the Total Quality Management and really expanded on it. They came up with continuous improvement, Kaison,and poki yoke.

Six Sigma is using statistics controlling quality in a product.

Total Quality Management involves many different areas. It deals with changing the way employees are treated. Things like empowering them with authority to be part of the decision making process. This is why Toyota has been so successful. Toyota receives 3 million suggestions from employees every year concerning improvements on their products. 85% of those suggestions are implemented. Not because they are all great ideas but to show the employees that their ideas are valued.

Deming established a list called the 14 Points.

As for the OP:

Establishing Six Sigma in your place of work it is best to bring in consultants to carry out the process of implementing the program and training the employees on how to work with it.

It means people in the company will have to be trained as green belt and black belt, so there will be trainers and an administrator for the program. Consider the difference between the two as having a Certificate and the next level having an AS in the program. There is one more level called a Master Black Belt and that would be considered having a BS with the program. You need the greens and a black employed with the company in order to keep the program going, or else the system will fall away like a fad.

Andy Germany, I will respectfully refrain from this one. I believe I'm on record here.

cr3

Lot of discussion has taken place on this subject is it worth spending any time on six sigma which is dead animal in this forum

crm

It may have its place, but only in mass production and full comittment.

I myself feels tha the average company with sales under $20,000,000.00 may have a hard time implementing

Hi

I'm working for Honeywell and have done a 6sigma project an year back. It is a very good tool to learn and implement for effective utlisation of resources & time.

It will not be possible for me to share the project or thoughts as they are company owned. However i can help you through in the areas of implementation when you go through the different faces of it.

Thanks....abraham

god bless six sigma and its participants &Advocates and keep Them FAR AWAY away from this forum mr Andy will agree with me

crm

Yeah, just look what it's done for Toyota..........who'd want their company to turn out like THAT.

Hi

As me being a green belt certified person, i would like to share some of my lessons of 6 sigma and my experiences in implementing the same.

1. Six sigma enables continous improvement to drive business results.

2. The concept is to eliminate waste & reduce variation.

3. The various tools / steps in a six sigma are

(a) Thought map - where you come in with your thoughts & this will be a living document updated as and when required.

(b) DMAIC is an abbreviation for Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and control. Herewith you will be placing your entire problem-control plan-solution issues.

(c) CE Analysis

(d) Improvement & control plans.

This is where the six sigma gets completion.

The still more minutest level of a six sigma implementation is a KAIZEN where in you will identify and sustain the improvement plan in a day to day activity like saving energy, paper, better work place environment & all that.

The points that i have shared above is a very minimum base line information. Guidance with a Black belt certified person will help the best.

Thanx

I personally find it was only useful in production trimming in a factory, nowhere else. Lots of companies outside of the first sentence have paid big bucks and still gone under....

Been there and got the T-Shirt!!!

I agree with you, Andy - improving development and production processes and results are essential but apart from that save me from all those free riders moving lots of paper from left to right and from right to left for lots of money.

People having a feeling for quality always produce quality and try to improve themselves as a personal challenge, all the others will only use their certificates as a shield.

Or, as an auditor said (very quietly, four eyes only ...):

If you had produced bullshit in the past, with ISO 9000 you will produce certificated bullshit in the future, but you have a valuable paper ...

What the heck, I'll chime in...

Take the name "six sigma" and then think about the mathematical definition of a standard deviation (sigma) of a normal distribution. A value of six sigma pretty much covers 99.5% of the distribution. So the idea is to be able to use all of your production from a given step in the process.

The rest of "six sigma" is the methods, statistically based, to measure the impact of changes to the process and then drive nonconformity (outliers) out of the process.

This works very well in a production setting. Once you get to management processes then I would say that you are back to the Disraeli quote of "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics."

And that's the problem. There are myriad misuses of statistics. The most popular being to find some sort of correlation using a linear least squares regression and then claiming cause and effect. Just because there is a correlation doesn't mean that you have a mechanism where one action is causing a result. You have to then prove the correlation.

Another misuse of statistics: say you have an effect that will happen 95% of the time for a given cause. If you run 20 tests of this then, statistically, you'll get one case where the effect does not occur. So an advertiser can claim that "a study shows that this happens" when, in fact, the probability is exactly the opposite.

So in a misuse of six sigma a person could use the process to arrive at a mistaken conclusion. Said person might not even understand that they are incorrect.

Then you can toss company politics into the mix....

Yuck.

One critisism of six sigma is you really have to get everyone within your company to buy into it, and that can be difficult in a large company with a large number of, shall we say, "established" employees.

I am a Six Sigma Black Belt - a title I achieved after 4 months of training with a group of 200 people representing 6 continents followed by two years of targeted application. I realize that this same title can be achieved in a week or two using on-line training - it all depends on how the company chooses to implement the program. My point is that as a program to increase the success rate of improvement projects, Six Sigma is no better or worse than any of the others out there - it is all a matter of the commitment of the company, especially upper management, to whatever program is used. It is really the concepts that are important, not the details. The key step in the process is the "C" in DMAIC - Control. This is the one that is usually skipped, normally leading to the need to do the same improvement project again in a few years. (The "MA" - Measure and Analyze - is also important, especially since we engineers often tend to jump right to the solution!) The company I was with at the time (Dow Chemical) chose to invest a lot of money and time at all levels and in all disciplines and departments on a Global training program to implement Six Sigma throughout the company. That commitment in itself is what leads to success.

You are correct.

It's not just Six Sigma, it applies to any quality program. Management has to be committed in implementing any new program. They have too. If you have just one manager as a loose cannon the employees will see this and conclude "If he doesn't have to do it then why should I."

This is because any quality program involves empowering the employees with becoming part of the decision making process and a lot of managers feel that is giving up some of their power.

Six Sigma isn't for every company but Total Quality Management is.

ISO 9000 is an expensive process to implement. Some of you feel that it is just pushing paper and that is not an exact assessment.

ISO 9000 is documenting errors and rework and recording the solution to what caused the problem so that it can be referenced as a lesson learned.

Besides changing the way employees are treated, Quality Control is finding solutions to what caused the error so that it doesn't ever happen again.

One major solution is establishing Standard Operating Procedures.

Deming States that there are three things that cause errors within a company:

The System is in Error - That applies to management.

The Process is in Error - That applies to Standard Operating Procedures and if there isn't one then it reverts right back to the System.

The Employee needs more training and the Employee is never wrong - This applies to Management taking responsibility for errors. Employees are there trying to do a good job and get ahead, they want the raises as much as anyone.

Empowering the Employees as part of the decision making process. Management creates the Standard Operating Procedures(This in effect creates a commitment from management to enforce the SOP) and delivers them to the employees to follow.

SOP's aren't perfect. When following the SOP and it is found that one of the steps in the process is in error it is up to the employees to put their heads together and come up with a solution and implement it.(This creates ownership by the employees.)

This reduces errors because everyone is doing the job the same as everyone else. It makes it easier for supervisors to stay on top of everyone because they can see right away what step that employee is on in the process.

Or you can go with the traditional method of management using the "My way or the Highway mentality" then the employees will do the absolute minimum they can get away with but still be able to hang on to their job.

There are too many variables that take place within a company and having an SOP will help in controlling those variables.

A motion to adjourn (this topic) is always in order.

milo

In closing I wish to reiterate; Six Sigma is a philosophy as much as a mathematical program.

Or so my experience has shown.

cr3

It's all about a fancy name and math language and that's it, all the concept and idea just based on common sense.

Comment from a green belt certified...been there and brought back a thick heavy binder, and a T-shirt too.

Six Sigma was, in GE, just another way of controlling their employees and was successful by diverting attention from the fear mongering 'corporate terrorists', which GE breeds, by making everyone focus on an overwhelming concept which few could even explain. It worked and GE's corporate terrorists spread out among us. They are among us.

Your statement doesn't apply here. That is a different topic concerning Corporations and how they influence our government. That is often classified as a conspiracy theory, which in many cases do have a lot of truth to them and are down played by experts in government to influence people into not believing them, this is an engineering forum. The idea here is to share ideas that can educate people better or help one another in accomplishing something.

I have no doubt that GE is involved in facilitating information censorship for the government because GE owns television networks and GE's Primary contract holder is with the U.S. Government.

That is a different story and we don't really want to get into debate here. I enjoy debating this subject but not here.

Also, get yourself registered so you'll get emails telling you that you've been responded too.