Posted on 07/30/2009 10:42:33 AM PDT by Syntyr
Are there any Freepers out there with Six Sigma experience or ranking? I am looking at obtaining the Lean Black Belt and was wondering if any one else had any input. Looking specifically if you have it is there a difference between the "Lean" versus "Regular" black belt and what are the requirements? Also if you have obtained what do you think of the value?
I was a manager in the Six Sigma Group at Digital Equipment Corp. We pushed 6S full-bore because top management wanted it. 6S is useless bullshit. “Like, man, 6 mistakes for every 1,000,000 transactions. Way cool, dude!” The company folded a few years later. That’s about it.
They made us go through that where i used to work. Seemed like a bunch of biz-speak mumbo-jumbo baloney, but it’s been a while. Probably looks good on the resume, though.
Maybe it’s a great program and i didn’t give into it as much as i should.
Six Sigma is a way to sell books and training programs.
Ergo, I despise Six Sigma.
It was an utter waste of time. I can't even count how much bad blood, bad feelings, employee resentment, and wasted hours were the result of the attempt.
I think most large companies are too inflexible to do this. Really.
Burning Platform: When I go visit Dave in his office, he is often not there.
Tools Used: Fishbone chart, Five Why's, etc.
Conclusion: Call Dave first, to make sure he's in his office, then go.
Estimated cost savings: Difficult to measure.
Big help. Huge. Just huge.
Let’s see: Boeing made one mistake in probably 1,000,000 decisions on the 787...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2304531/posts
In other words, perhaps the size of the mistake matters too.
Just make sure your fishbones are swimming upstream...
As do I. I was at Dow Chemical when they got all wound up about that.
I never saw the value.
I’m going to add to the Choir here.
Six Sigma is useful in some limited situations where you can get exact performance metrics and there are lots of transactions.
In situations where the above doesn’t apply it becomes a vast amount of paperwork and overhead for very little value.
If you have to go, go. They are a waste of time, as most businesses just want to say they do it, but almost none of them actually change the way they do things and actually do them that way consistently.
They want their people to go, some really like it, but when they get back, they are tossed back into projects that don’t use it because it has to be out the door yesterday.
Take the money you’re going to spend out into the parking lot and set fire to it ... you won’t waste as much time.
We used six sigma at the company where I currently work. We then used several other variations of it. None of these business improvement processes can solve the problem of having idiotic managers.
We are currently working on the fourth or fifth analysis process, which will end the same as the previous. Needless to say, most of us are looking for work...
6S requires that you have measurable processes to improve; many people fail to realize at the outset of an improvement effort that they DO NOT. Much of the B.S. 6S within the Department of Defense and around the Fed Gov goes wrong because of this.
I would recommend studying Lean Six Sigma vs. a Six Sigma course without Lean. (Actually, the American Society for Quality has incorporated Lean into the Six Sigma Blacv Belt Body of Knowledge itself).
Lean is far more useful when you are dealing with a client that has not adequately mapped their processes yet and may be performing all kinds of steps which are so obviously non value adding as to warrant no sophisticated statistical analysis.
Hope that helps. Check www.asq.org for info.
In order to ask that question, I will have to do a “Quality Circle” Group, get a crapload of sticky-notes for affinity studies, construct a Pareto Chart, a Fishbone graph, then fabricate a lot more bovine scatology, then put on an air of “I finally know what the hell I’m talking about”. In other words, if I have to go through all of that, we’re both wasting a valuable commodity - time.
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Exactly! I Could not have said it better myself.
As a business consultant, I never recommended executives who could not explain their jobs in simple terms (without referring to the latest business fad/book) that a person of average intelligence could understand. If they were not smart enough to simplify the complexities, they were not smart enough to understand and solve problems, much less lead people.
Six Sigma is fundamentally built around one idea (expression of error rates by standard deviation) two process improvement methodologies (DMAIC and DMADV - both inspired by Deming's work at Toyota), and a series of tools and templates, which you can begin to learn about here.
Much of this is highly useful material, but it is not necessary to pay $5000 for a certificate when you can become an expert in these ideas and methods without the "belts". Just my two cents.
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