Six Sigma Soup

Six Sigma works best when it works synergistically

Six Sigma has been credited with six- or even seven-figure returns in single projects, but it has not kept the manufacturing jobs of its principal exponents—Motorola, General Electric, and Maytag—in the United States. Henry Ford, on the other hand, proved that lean manufacturing can make almost any job sufficiently productive to pay high wages to an American worker. Why, then, does Six Sigma deliver outstanding results in some applications and fail miserably in others? I contend that its status as a buzzword or breakthrough improvement program depends on the manner in which it is used.

The folk tale about stone soup is highly instructive. Three soldiers (or itinerant consultants) were traveling a country that had been ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars, and they soon discovered that villagers hid whatever food they had whenever soldiers appeared. The men were desperate for a meal, but they knew that simply asking for one at the next town would not work.

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Comments

Does the order of introducing the ingredients matters?

Hello William,

I agree with your comments; Six Sigma does work and is complementary to Lean.

I would add to your comments the fact that the order of implementation is also important. One of the differences between a good and mediocre soup is the order of the ingredients, isn't it? I am not a cook nor very passionate about cooking but I do like a good soup!

Using the fine tools of Six Sigma in a random order is not going to provide the expected results. I would go even further and say that, if Lean has not done its job in eliminating waste there should be no Six Sigma implementation. What is the point in using DOE if the waste is so evident that you can see it just walking the plant? Why use hypothesis testing to prove that two sets of data are different when you can see the difference clearly if you just look in the scrap bin?

So, the order matters, not only in using the SS tools but also when to use SS all together.

George Bacioiu - gbacioiu@ELSEinc.com

LSS Consultant - www.ELSEinc.com

6 Sigma Nonsense

Will consultants like Levinson ever stop the utter nonsense of statements such as his: "assuming a worst-case process shift of 1.5 standard deviations, deliver only 3.4 defects per million opportunities"?

Anyone who believes this rubbish deserves to fail.

Re: "6 Sigma Nonsense"

If the process follows a normal distribution and the nearest specification limit is 4.5 standard deviations from the mean, 3.4 ppm of the distribution will be beyond the specification limit (in the absence of assignable or special causes). If it does not follow a normal distribution then all bets are off but it is still possible to calculate the nonconforming fraction if the non-normal distribution can be identified and fitted.