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Desperately Seeking the Truth
People today are bombarded by so much information that they have become numb to what feels like advertising or, during political cycles like we are in today, out and out fabrication. Small business owners should resist the temptation to copy...
How to Protect Yourself & Your Business
As a business owner, you already know how important it is for your customers to feel safe about doing business with you. After all, if a customer even suspects he may not receive everything he was promised, then chances are he's taking his business...
One of The Best New Business Opportunities May Be Right there in Your Home - a New Daycare Business.
The day care industry is expanding. There are now more than 100,000 licensed child-care centers and 250,000 licensed family day care homes across the United States.
The market for day care increases every year as the working mother in society...
Review: Small Business Taxes Made Easy
Publishing Guidelines: You may freely reprint this article in a print or online magazine, e-zine, or newsletter provided you leave the byline intact, don’t change the content (except for grammar/punctuation), and make The Dabbling Mum web address...
Types of Investment
The word 'investments' is one that most of us are familiar with hearing in financial context. For many of us, it may make us thing of big business and vasts sums of money, but there's much to the world of investments than multi-million dollar...
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The Six Sigma Method And Design Of Experiments
Six Sigma is becoming a proven approach for businesses and organizations to improve their performance. The spectrum of companies actively engaging in Six Sigma today is wide from industrials like Celanese, Caterpillar, GE, Honeywell, and 3M to service/retail organizations like Starwood Hotels, Sears, and Home Depot. Six Sigma has even started in the financial industry with Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase initiating major deployments in the past two years. Probably the most exciting area is in the public and healthcare sectors with success stories emerging from city government and John Hopkins Medical.
So what is all this excitement about? Haven’t these quality tools been around for years? Is it just the fact that people have strange names like Champion, Green Belt, Black Belt and for the chosen few, Master Black Belt? Okay, if it is not the names then what? Six Sigma’s success revolves around the fundamental elements needed for any successful organization. Six Sigma starts with a vision of delivering products and services to customers with no defects from the eyes of the customers. For companies it is vital to deliver these products and services at a profit. Once the organization has created their own vision of Six Sigma, the business leaders need to define their organization’s objectives in numerical terms. These “high-level metrics,” often called big Y’s in Six Sigma, are the foundation for identifying project y’s that Six Sigma Belts will execute projects on. With big Y’s in hand, business leaders called Six Sigma “Champions” breakdown these organizational level Y’s into smaller y’s a project leader called a Green Belt or Black Belt can work from.
So what’s next, do business leaders take a hands-off management by objectives (MBO) approach of, “I don’t care how you do it as long as you get results!”? For Six Sigma organizations the answer is a loud “NO.” Champions do care how projects are executed and have appointed highly trained Master Black Belts to assist and mentor project leaders in applying the Six Sigma method to manage their projects. I believe this is the key to Six Sigma’s success. In a past life I participated in a high-level meeting with executives from the world leader in the production of a product we all know. The purpose of the meeting and visit was to evaluate a critical new product
design. All of the high-tech executives were dressed in dark Italian business suits complemented with gold and diamonds. I listened closely to each question these executives asked. I never once heard “how much?”, “when?” or even “why?” – every question was “by what method?.” Methodology is what Six Sigma is about.
Six Sigma Methods
There have evolved two key methods for carrying out Six Sigma projects. The first method is the most well-defined and works best if you have a problem with an unknown solution in existing products, processes or services. This method is called DMAIC or Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control. The newest method, which is in the developing stages, is called Design for Six Sigma or DFSS. The goal of DFSS is to develop a new product, process or service that is defect-free in the eyes of the customer. A number of consulting companies have invented roadmaps for DFSS like IDOV (Identify, Design, Optimize and Validate) and DMADV (Design, Measure, Analyze, Design and Verify).
Six Sigma and Design of Experiments
Once an organization has decided on the method and the project y’s, Belts are marched off to training “waves” bringing management-approved projects to class. DMAIC Green Belt training is normally two one-week sessions separated by one month. Black Belt training waves are extended by two additional months with two more weeks of training. The emphasis during the extended two weeks of Black Belt training is often on learning more details about advanced tools such as Design of Experiments (DOE).
So where does Design of Experiments fit into Six Sigma? Six Sigma is about understanding and controlling the variation of key process variables known as inputs or x’s in order to obtain improved results on project outputs or y’s. In Design of Experiment terms these inputs or x’s are often referred to as factors and the outputs are referred to as responses. In nearly all Six Sigma projects the relationship of the project y’s takes on the form of y
About the Author
Peter Peterka is the leading consultant for www.6sigma.us. Peter has eleven years of experience performing as a Master Black Belt, working with numerous companies, including 3M, Dell, Dow, GE, HP, Intel, Motorola, Seagate, and Xerox. You can signup for Peter's Six Sigma Certification at www.6sigma.us.
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