Process Excellence

From 1995 till 2007 - About 50,000 US citizens died due to want of a suitable organ donor.   An interesting statistic - Only 28% Americans have chosen to donate their organs while 99.9% of French citizens are potential donors.   What is the reason for this striking difference? Let us explore one by one. Awareness? - This cannot be the reason as large number of camp

Many people think Six Sigma works for repetitive processes and has no application for project situations. When I say project situations, I mean industries that work primarily with projects. Project situations are common in companies and functions that carry out construction, commissioning and installations, software development, plant and machinery development and manufacture, research & development etc. Although these sectors have significant differences in challenges that they face, the co

Human Resource Development provides wonderful opportunities for Six Sigma implementation. In HR, the following types of projects are commonly carried out. The list only shows examples and is by no means exhaustive. Reduce the time required to hire an employee Improve employee on-boarding and orientation processes Reduce expenditures for Recruitment Improve timeliness and the value of employee perfo

One of my friends is a Sales Wiz with wonderful selling skills with little Six Sigma knowledge. In his previous job, he was leading Sales in an IT company. His job profile rotated mainly around closing deals initiated by junior Sales Executives.   He spent a lot of time in resolving quotation related issues with clients. Issues arose almost everyday because Clients used to call different Sales persons in the company and used to get differe

Let us assume the talent pool available in the market is same for company A and company B. Company A decides to to use Six Sigma for improving their results from recruitment process while company B does not do this.   Now we would like to understand how company A can get better results with Six Sigma.   Let us assume that Company A goes through DMAIC in the following way.

I have compiled quotes for Six Sigma beginners and my comments are in green. Feel free to change the green text and use wherever you like. However, the black text is protected by the wise men who developed them. Here you go..   "It's better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one, than to have an opportunity and not be prepared" - Whitney Young Jr *There is no better way to prepare than to learn the worl

There is nothing which compares to the effectiveness of Six Sigma when it comes to improving a company/organization’s operational efficiency, raising its productivity, and lowering its costs. Six Sigma improves design processes, gets products to market faster with fewer defects, and builds customer loyalty.   Perhaps the biggest but most unheralded benefit of Six Sigma is its capacity to develop a cadre of great leaders.

The right sample size - How we address this dilemma?   Sample size calculation is the act of choosing the number of observations to include in a statistical sample. The sample size is an important feature of any empirical study in which the goal is to make inferences about a population from a sample. In practice, the sample size used in a study is determined based on the expense of data collection, and the need to have sufficient statistic

    How the use of hypothesis testing shall be a great asset in my company?   We do decision making everyday in our personal and professional life but most of the times it’s not backed by sufficient data to arrive at a confident decision. For example, we do choose different routes to reach a particular destination, but this decision most of the time is based on our likes of th

1. Introduction   1.1 General   Sample-size determination is often an important step in planning a statistical study—and it is usually a difficult one. Among the important hurdles to be surpassed, one must obtain an estimate of one or more error variances, and specify an effect size of importance. There is the temptation to take some shortcuts. This paper offers some suggestions for success

    The inductive inference consists in arriving at a decision to accept or reject a null hypothesis (H0) after inspecting only a sample from it. As such, an element of risk - the risk of taking wrong decisions is involved. In any test procedure the four possible mutually disjoint and exhaustive decisions are:   Reject Null Hypothesis when actually it is not true, i.e. when

The story revolves around the growing of square watermelons in Japan. Japanese grocery stores had a problem. They are much smaller than their US counterparts and therefore don’t have room to waste. Watermelons, big and round, wasted a lot of space. Most people would simply tell the grocery stores that watermelons grow round and there is nothing that can be done about it. But some Japanese farmers took a different approach. ”If the supermarkets want a space efficie

SMART Goals Once you have planned your project, turn your attention to developing several goals that will enable you to be successful. Goals should be SMART - specific, measurable, agreed upon, realistic and time-based. A goal might be to hold a weekly project meeting with the key members of your team or to organise and run a continuous test programme throughout the project. The acronym SMART has a number of slight

I observed that the scope of six sigma has increased it is now applicable in many industrial sectors. When Bill Smith created this methodology his main focus was defect reduction and improvement which brings excellence and process improvement, later on Quality formed the core of other methodology/framework too.   I have seen that the approach of employees toward quality management has not yet changed, they still consider this as the job of