The Doctor Is In The Blogiverse…

• Testing New Twitter Tools… #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

• Marine Corps Birthday Today; Veteran’s Day Tomorrow. Hug a vet this week, thank them for your freedom… #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

• Testing Twhirl and Twitter… #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

• Restarting TheQualityDoctor.com this weekend; beginning with update of WordPress and a new theme… #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

There’s No Place Like Home…

After a semester away, teaching and researching for my next book on Quality, it’s time to begin all over again.

Over the next few months I’ll be delivering new content here at the Quality Doctor site on the tools and techniques of our industry, with two key directions: Presenting new/improved techniques, and eliminating common misconceptions about key tools and interpretations. My discussions with colleagues in industry and academia, here and around the globe, have given me a renewed appreciation for the continued needs of global industry to (correctly) apply the “language of business” to key improvements. These discussions have also energized me to amplify my own efforts in the field.

Oh, the book? Yes, it will continue to be developed. No final preparation date has been set. Several key concepts will be tested out here, though. So stay tuned to the Quality Doctor for a first look!

For a preview of a couple of the concepts, you can can read my recent article in the new Journal produced by the Taiwanese Center for Synergistic Development (in Chinese). I’ll post both English and Chinese versions here in the Vault.

Progress Always…

Technorati : Center for Synergistic Development, Taiwan, quality improvement

This is the first in a planned series on Process Capability, exclusive to the Quality Doctor.

My encounters with Process Capability practices Indicate there is a lot of room for improvement and standardization in this arena. There is a lot of missing information, misinformation and outright bad interpretations inside Quality functions at many of the factories and companies I visit. The magnitude of the problem compels me to challenge this situation. I will post occasionally to this Series, to address specifics I grapple with while consulting globally.

There are several general issues; some examples:

• Confusion about, and misuse of, standard Capability Index labels
• Over-simplification of key concepts
• Violations of assumptions, usually through ignorance, leading to bad decisions
• Unsophisticated statistical interpretations of Capability
• Attempts to extrapolate IQC sampling to Capability

There significant variation in the good practices I see as well.  This is a more pernicious problem, as it indicates a lack of standardization in the Quality Improvement (QI) industry on this topic.  It is my belief that such variation in terminology and execution, while perhaps “correct,” leads to confusion among managers and less-sophisticated QI colleagues.  I have personally seen it lead to ongoing waste in the relationships between suppliers and customers.  I believe we need basic standard practices in the same vein as the basics of Statistical Process Control (SPC/SQC).  I will occasionally propose specific principles where I find the need.

In closing, we should remember the purpose of Capability:  To assure customers about our ability to meet their needs.  It’s truly about business decisions, predictability and levels of trust.  While Capability practices can’t provide all those conclusions, it certainly has a key role.

I spent a couple pleasant hours with a couple of friends last evening, discussing trends in Quailty Improvement (QI). One of the gentlemen is my main contact at a client; the other is a very experienced QI professional I’ve had the honor to consult with, and also produce articles and training. These two men have opinions and insight I trust.

It seems the QI cycle is coming around once again at my client. After several years of great success, the company has undergone a major shift in management focus. The QI group lost their leader in the process, and is re-inventing themselves while they look for a new executive sponsor. Amid all that choas, the program continues to run smoothly along (my opinion), but it’s clear that more than a sponsor is needed here.

In short, the QI group has met most of its long-term and short-term goals and needs to find ways to take themselves, and the overall organization, to the next level. Not an easy task! And other parts of the organization have caught the Lean Fever, and are making a case to replace the previous methods with a purely Lean perspective.

More “us and them” divisions become apparent when that happens.

The current QI methodology is evolving to a full Lean Six Sigma hybrid in any case. I see that as a good sign of a maturing and healthy Six Sigma program, in today’s world. To now toss all that out and go “purely Lean” would be a loss, in my opinion. In any case, this may have more to do with staking claims politically during a time of great leadership flux. Whatever the motivations, narrowing down the tools and methods is not a way to go forward.

Had the organization “failed” in their Six Sigma endeavors while Lean worked in their factories, I might have had a different view. But the past decade has seen their Six Sigma program rise from humble beginnings to achieve about 5% of revenue annually in savings and other gains. All the other indicators are fairly healthy as well. No need to stop!

In between bites of quesadilla, the two of us who consult managed to agree on those points. We were preaching to the choir, of course! The client contact already knew, as he’s been with the program from the beginning.

The lesson is, business cycles often turn inside the long view of QI, but still, QI has to adjust at times, and certainly they need to continue the push for excellence for themselves as well as for the firm. Benchmarking studies recently indicate that many mature Six Sigma programs are hybridizing with at least one other philosophy, with Lean the top choice.

Next up for the client: A funding model that doesn’t rely solely on a percentage of P&L gains from projects…

Excellence Always!

Technorati : business performance improvement, lean six sigma, lean technology, six sigma

Many firms are driving a renewed focus on customer satisfaction through a variety of initiatives. Of course, many of these campaigns are well-intentioned, and will produce important gains for their businesses. However, there’s some real concern on the part of the workers whose job it is to execute these initiatives.

Their concern centers on the apparent “soft” nature of customer satisfaction. How do we define it? How do we measure it? How will we talk about it using data? Simply saying “improve customer satisfaction” isn’t enough. As Dr. W. E. Deming observed, “It’s not enough to do your best, you must know what to do” before progress can be made.

The projects I was fortunate enough to see this past week were all good ones, focusing on real needs. Some involved new process definition and implementation, while more examined issues with existing, operating processes. Many could use Lean Thinking tools as well, to avoid local optimizations that would simply not be noticed, or worse yet, damage other productivity. A week of working and learning, and these projects are in good hands, I feel.

The topic of most interest, over and over, was how to quantify the benefits of enhancing customer satisfaction. Of course, it’s an almost universal belief that improving customer satisfaction leads to more and better business. And in some situations, the connection is clear and direct. However, for many professionals who are not directly connected to the business’s external customer base, these connections are often tougher to elucidate and vocalize.

I used a tool that has general applications to help with this effort. I’ve used it effectively in analyzing the benefits of eliminating muda from systems, and it translates well to customer satisfaction clarification.

I begin with a large, blank sheet of paper taped to the wall in landscape orientation, and mark three columns. On the first column I place a header: “Elements.” The question: “What elements of our business, within our project scope, have an impact on customer satisfaction?” A list appears fairly quickly in most cases.

On the second column I write “Changes Inside.” The question here: “When we implement our improvement, what customer satisfaction related changes should/will/must we see inside the process?” For each item in Elements there should be one or more Changes shown.

The third column is headed by “Deliverables.” This column lists all the concrete benefits that derive from the changes. These include increased response, reduced dispatches and rework, lower costs, and more. Productivity, timeliness, financial metrics and quality are all possible items here.

For the first column, the entries should be nouns, perhaps with modifiers. For the second column, the standard categories of causes (methods, machines, measurements, materials, people, environment) work as a checklist to drive the brainstorm to completion. This second column also helps to illuminate the costs and challenges. The final column is where the project leads see the measurable items that finance can use to estimate savings and/or new revenues.

After this discussion, several team leaders expressed confidence that they could now build a meaningful cost-benefit evaluation so their projects could be justified meaningfully.

They also said they now had a better idea of the connections between what they do and what the customer needs. It all comes full circle…

Technorati : Green Belt, Lean Technology, Lean Thinking, Quality Improvement, Singapore, Six Sigma

Preparing new employees for Six Sigma may sometimes be a challenge. Before you can mobilize their skills and talents towards Quality Improvement, you must first align them to the philosophy of the firm, and to the improvement goals. Not everyone comes to the client with the same background in Quality, and if they have previous experience, they may already know more than the minimum.

The real challenge as a facilitator of an introductory class is, assessing the room and learning who’s ahead and who’s just starting out. And then getting them all to work together, with the experienced folks helping out. Sometimes even as “junior facilitators.” Without them quite figuring out how you got them to lead.

It’s a lot of fun, but not an easy assessment to do. And you often have about ten minutes to get that evaluation done and make a plan. In your head.

Yellow Belt Training isn’t something that every Six Sigma firm does, but a number of firms see value from such an introductory workshop. This time, I had a relatively homogeneous group, in terms of exposure to Quality and in work history. The problem this time was, a batch of training materials didn’t arrive. And to complicate matters further, my main contact at the company was away on a trip, taking a class in China. Time to improvise!

As always, I have a few items with me. After explaining the issue to the attendees, I told them how they were going to work around and through this minor setback. It didn’t take long to convince them that we’d actually have more fun than expected, and maybe more learning.

We dove in. We ran through the first section of materials, then got to experimenting with a simple process. They set up their “R&D,” collected data, and then analyzed using the simplest assessment: Pass-Fail, and overall failure rate. After that, they realized they needed to improve some things, and they immediately had ideas. At this point, the challenge became restraining them from implementing “improvements” immediately.

We worked through the remainder of the DMAIC cycle, exploring a few key tools and and then applying them to their process. The day closed with another “data run” and analysis. Each team improved dramatically, and the real moral of the story was, few of their initial ideas for improvement were retained in their actual implementations. One team implemented only two simple concepts and took their failure rate from 97% to 3% in one improvement cycle, and they had ideas for “future projects.”

Success. They’re primed, they feel capable and empowered; all they need is a real target and they’re off…

Technorati : Singapore, quality training, sig sigma, yellow belt

the course in Hypothesis Testing is going extremely well this week. We’re ahead of schedule, which means I’ll have time for a nice facilities tour at the end.

I enjoy working with engineers and technical staff here in Singapore. They’re focused on their learning, they are well-prepared, and they interact. A perfect audience for a career facilitator! Even the two marketing representatives in the class have engineering degrees, so there’s no statistics phobia in the room.

Hypothesis testing, or more correctly comparative experimentation, is often the most confusing subject in practical statistics. Why do I need fresh data? Which direction is the test? What does it mean to “fail to reject?” How can we make a mistake, and what are the practical consequences? A more daunting issue for many attendees: How to use statistical software systematically. And what part of the extensive report the program gives is really the Most Important.

Fortunately, there is an underlying, simple strategy to all hypothesis testing. And once that’s made clear, the attendees can make rapid progress. That’s cleary what happened here in Singapore. The first day seemed dangerously slow to a couple of the participants; they were worried the class would last two weeks! However, we will finish early, and now they’re very relaxed about the schedule. The acceleration that repeated practice has given them is amazing, and they can now analyze complex data sets and draw reliable conclusion in just a few minutes. Their confidence is up as well.

Now if there were only a guaranteed way to have them practice on the job, my work would be over…

Technorati : comparative experiments, consulting, hypothesis, quality, singapore, statistics, training