Analyzing Six Sigma Shortfalls

I was involved in some internal quality problems with a particular computer company, where Sixth Sigma Guys were sent in, boy were they happy to get out of there as quickly as they could!!!!

Total failure....mainly because they did not have the correct background to understand the problem at first hand....

This reminds me of my best time with the big meat ball company (actually somebody call it 'GE') when six sigma was a very hot topic favored by Jack Welch. Thousands of six sigma 'projects' were completed with tons of fancy charts with 'fish bone' present while everybody was working hard toward his/her 'green belt' certificate. At the end, most of the best 'solution' turnt out to be only based on common sense, or in other words, the common sense interpreted in 6 sigma language.

A Six Sigma attempt was made some time ago at my place of employment (an international manufacturer of business machines whose name I will not mention). It might have made a difference had we been manufacturing the same widget year after year but we were in software development. The closest thing we had to mindless repetitive drudgery was management which somehow was not involved in the process.

Remember that quality control was invented by the munitions industry to keep from blowing up the factory. The result, more dud rounds on the battle field but the factory kept producing rounds.

My experience with quality and safety experts is summed up by the following analogy.

A flood has washed out a bridge. The quality/safety personnel will help you roll a rock into the road to keep people from driving off of the washed out bridge. But, they will have nothing to do with rebuilding the bridge. That's "not their job."

Moose, 6 sigma today is like the always quoted, never understood, discredited hawthorne experiment, link: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/204/nohawth.html

and will soon fall from grace as people realize that statistical manipulation of crap gives you, well, statistically manipulated crap. Whatever answer you wnt, a six sigma black belt will get you.

I love it when the outside experts,(whether you call them MBA' s, blackbelts, or consultants really doesn;t matter) they will define the problem their way, solve it their way, and totally miss the point of the entire process:

Case number 1: lathe wouldnt hold tolerance

Where: pipe mill lab, major steel company.

When early 1980's (i know, before Six sigma, but a prime example of statistical process abuse:)

SPC experts took readings, did capabilitystudies, made us do control charts, couldn't hold tolerance. MBA's took SPC data and justified new lathe.

WHile we were waiting for new lathe to arrive, I was assigned to run shop. Installed PM program, changed, cleaned, and filled coolant reservoir- lathe miraculously in control. Reexamined data- temperature climbed over time. always started up in control. Guys adjusted tools as entire machine heated up- SPC experts missed the trend in their own time series data.

So much for "problem identification and understanding your data."

CAse 2 Air compressor

Insufficient air to run our shop in summer, especially in high humidity.

Engineering sent down an MBA to do a study. He recommended a new compressor after a day and a half. Much of which he spent interviewing people in lunchroom because shop was too noisy.

Head of die and tool dept, no friend of college boys, told MBA to just leave at the reporting meeting. He told our dept supt to get his maintenance guys off their butts and fix the air leaks, and oh by the way change out the dryers...

16 hours later the shop was MUCH quieter and we had plenty of air.

An MBA can dollar cost justify anything- but its few and far between that actually understand the actaual process and parameters.

Six sigma is just a way for the top brass to do an end run on their nonfunctional chain of command.

I am half way through my MBA, have a 4.0, and have taught and will teach statistics.

But six sigma as practiced by most northamerican managements is voodoo and abuse of process. And supplier abuse , when these incapable customers prescribe to their suppliers how they should run their plants.

"Do as I say, not as I do" is why the big 2-1/2 in detroit are in the fix they're in.

milo

Prior to retirement a number of years ago I was forced to sit through a 6 sigma course. This after a doctorate in Chem Eng, 30 years experience and , oh yeah. I minored in statistics and taught it.

The guys giving the class didnt have a clue of what is required to engineer a functioning process or how to address a real problem. American industry has put themselves out of business by their lack of attention to detail and concern over short term profits.

BTW, the company I worked for went belly up 2 months after I left; serves them right. If short term profits are your only game you get what you deserve.

Here's something else to think about: Ford has spent the last thirty years moving all its factories out of the US, claiming they can't make money paying American wages.

TOYOTA has spent the last thirty years building more than a dozen plants inside the US. The last quarter's results:

TOYOTA makes 4 billion in profits while Ford racked up 9 billion in losses.

Ford folks are still scratching their heads.

IF THIS WASN'T SO SAD IT MIGHT BE FUNNY

guest you said:American industry has put themselves out of business by their lack of attention to detail and concern over short term profits.

I couldn't agree more. But add this caveat: American industry did it as well by eliminating industrial engineers. This gave them a host of ill conceived suboptimal processes, which now magically , voila industrial engineering via six sigma legerdermain now attempts to repair. The annual salary deferred was lost on crappy layouts in the first month, if not sooner, due to lousy productivit, in many cases.

I worked for a steel company and was made plant manger of the just completed plant. Then they fired an engineer- one of three. When I asked why, they said, we already built the plant, why do we need three engineers? We had 5 plants...

That company didn't make it into the next century.

milo

I agree with a lot of what has been said and although I am European, I worked for several major computer companies, all from the USA.

The problem is US managers mostly, they see an expense (an expensive trouble shooter like myself for example) and see it as an easy choice to let them go (thankfully with a more than golden handshake!!) to save a lot of money, without ever understanding what we were doing (keeping things running smoothly, making sure that small problems did not turn into large problems for example).

I also gave training to both internal people and customers. the earnings from this training was actually much higher than all my costs put together (they forgot that I actually was a plus on the balance sheet not a minus!!).....

Most US CEOs, are so myopic that the end of their own nose is not in focus and the people they use to fix things (Sixth Sigma for example) are only focused on getting paid and looking like they are doing what the Boss requires.....

My last CEO, who had invested heavily in the company, turned the company on its head (causing massive customer problems at the same time) so that it appeared to a prospective buyer that we were leading the industry, we got bought out, most of us got laid off, the CEO's shares came out at over 70M US Dollars, he retired......now the company that bought us is in severe financial contraints......well they deserve it!

2 years later I am still waiting for my recommendation letter from their Human resources team (outsourced to Poland!!)......that even once told me I never worked for them (I still have the ID card somewhere!) after 26 years with the company before!!

Wichsers, all of them.....(thats a common German word for Onanieren......) the last "s" is the English plural, not German of course......

I believe that much of industries problems that get "studied" are actually a maintenance, operator capability or equipment capability issue that the company already has the internal understanding to resolve. At least someone in upper management notices the problem needs fixed which is fine as long as the individual doesn't take all the credit and treats others fairly.

Can a few of you tell us of Sixth Sigma jobs that worked out well?

http://tinyurl.com/dchdn

http://tinyurl.com/dchdn

http://tinyurl.com/dchdn

regards, milo

Thanks Milo, I needed that ....... (!?*+!!??)

You're welcome!

milo

Well, I know there's one good thing you can say about sick sigma...............but I can't remember what it is!!!

Actually it's very good for solving problems........but it has to be the same problem, over and over and over........

Joe

I can only think of a couple of examples as job creation... When my previous employer decided to go for six sigma, our HR posted new openings on the local newspaper for two black belts and one master black belt, for my team of some 20...

Moose-excellent subject. I worked for what was once a large U.S. forms printer whose CEO became fascinated with Six Sigma during 2001. Andy Germany, yep, last year I got a parachute too! I remember the words "a new way of doing business" as the rallying cry for the programme. New? Not to those of us who long ago used the functions contained within the Six Sigma world to solve more complex problems.

I remember it so well. Every plant was to have two (2) black belts, and every remaining exempt person would become a green belt. A tremendous amout of money was spent training people, and then assigning very small and safe projects. I do remember how much an excellent presentation, or very rehearsed "dog and pony" show was emphasized to impress the corporate types. But in the end, the programme implemented by this employer showed itself to be just another corporate buzzword to impress potential customers. It did not work. There were no real savings, and plants continued to be closed and much business lost to never return.

Someone used the term "common sense". I think many of us agree that it is sad that these two words (coupled with people who possessed an innate knowledge of the process) were replaced with phrases such as "Six Sigma", "5-S", "Kaizen" and the like. But, one cannot blame the organizations who propose and provide training for these subjects to corporate types. Excellent marketing, in my opinion!

Is Six Sigma a faulty set of tools, modern-day business hype, or something useful? I think it is something very useful when implemented correctly. In other words, don't wait until quality becomes poor, costs are rising, and sales are sliding to pull this "miracle" from a sack and expect it to be the business' salvation. The tools contained in the programme are good tools-just don't wait for the wrong opportunity, and don't place it in the wrong hands.

Regards,

Ing. Robert Forbus

Good input, thanks.

I design analogue semiconductor circuits. I use six-sigma in the design stage. No, I don't mean six-sigma techniques according to the book*. I mean that I try to design so that product still works when the matching and other tolerances are at the nominal six-sigma statistical limits of the manufacturing process. Surprise, surprise, I get decent manufacturing yields even on the most precise designs.

The biggest difficulty is the quality of the data - if the process was stationary, five-sigma would be more than good enough; as it isn't, we still get parametric failures with nominal six-sigma designs...

*To me, a black belt is what you get from a high-voltage power supply