Do Your Employees Have the Tools to Succeed with Lean Six Sigma?

Why ‘No Belts’ need access to an easy, Excel-based software

At a recent health-care conference I had a conversation with Mary, a Six Sigma Black Belt for a 700-bed hospital. She told me that the hospital had only a few copies of Minitab software, which was shared by several people. She was always being asked to close out of the program so that someone else could use it.

Recently I spoke with a several Six Sigma Green Belts who work for a large defense contractor. They told me they had no registered software at their disposal, that only the Black Belts were provided with software.

A professor who teaches Six Sigma has his students draw a Pareto chart by hand, and he times them; the best and worst times range from 45 to 75 minutes. Then he shows his students how to draw a Pareto chart in seconds using Excel-based software.

I’m going to argue that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to succeed at Six Sigma without software.

Consider the surprisingly high cost of lean Six Sigma:
• Up to $250,000 to train a Six Sigma Black Belt
• Up to $60,000 to train a Six Sigma Green Belt

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Comments

Quality Digest

How is this valuable for a quality professional? This is just blatant product promotion.

Re: blatant product promotion

Sorry JSTATS, but I disagree with your statement. I read into this article the need for better availability to the software for anyone measuring, monitoring and improving processes, and not standalone products. And he has applied good logic to his argument, the cost for training the belts and those that will be expected to measure and monitor after the belt projects are completed.

His suggestion for several alternatives for a readily available spreadsheet product, Excel, including his own, with just a hint of promotion at the very end, I don't sconsider "blatant promotion" just taking advantage of an opportunity.

My perspective

Gordon - thank you for your comments. The portions I found to be blatantly promotional:

- The article is about IT resources being constrained, but it is not just "inexpensive" software that is suggested as the solution, but "Excel-based" software. I don't see what being Excel-based has to do with freeing IT resources. A $200 package is $200 whether it works as an Excel add-in or not.

- The cost of standalone software is cited as $2500. I know of no software used by more than a very small fraction of Six Sigma practitioners at that cost. The two packages cited by name - Minitab and JMP - don't cost that. I am not as familiar with JMP's pricing (but know it is significantly less than that), but most companies use networked Minitab licenses and are probably paying at most $200/user already.

It would not rub me wrong on Jay's website where he must make a case for someone purchasing his product, but Quality Digest is supposed to be a resource for professionals. While the need for better availability of software is important in our field, I feel that the solution proposed does not tie specifically to the problem stated and just promotes the product the author sells.

I thought the same thing

Jay has some good ideas to share, but this was an advertisement.

Why Six Sigma Fails

I believe that Six Sigma often fails because companies don't give their employees the tools they need to do the work. This isn't a small problem. It's huge. And it's not just Six Sigma, but any activity that requires PC software. IT and purchasing constrain the resource and employees take that as a clue that it's not important, so they stop doing it.

And too many people report that they can't sustain the improvements they make. Why? Because the workers don't have SPC software to monitor performance and the "belts" are too busy to handle the charting for everyone.

I don't think SPC software companies are in competition with each other; I think we're in competition with IT and purchasing.

This article felt too promotional when I wrote it, but I didn't know how to explain it without bringing my experience into it.

Case Study in Six Sigma Tool Foolishness

I got a call from a small manufacturing company about the QI Macros. They had just trained 16 Green Belts at a cost of over $3,000 per person. Each employee was in class for two weeks, so let's call that 80 hours at a loaded rate of $50/hour = $4,000. So that's $7,000 per person or roughly $112,000 total. And that doesn't count the lost opportunity cost of employees not being on their jobs for two weeks which might be at least another $4,000 per person or $64,000 additional.

The caller asked how much it would be to put the QI Macros on a single PC that all 16 could share.

Seriously? After spending $7,000-$11,000 per person for training, you can't spend $200 per person to make them productive?

And what about the training company that didn't include software with their training? Teaching Six Sigma methods without providing the tools to be productive should be considered malpractice.

This is just one of the many calls I get every week where some purchasing department is trying to skrimp on software at the expense of productivity. Mega waste! So I don't care if you buy the QI Macros or some other Six Sigma toolkit, but stop wasting money on training if you aren't willing to back it up with tools to make people productive. It's foolish.