Six Sigma and Quality Management

[Laxtonto 12078]

I am finishing up writing an entire semester long Six Sigma and Quality Management graduate course centered around the Quality Council of Indiana CSSBB Primer for this coming Spring Semester and I curious if any of the Surly faithful are in this realm?

In addition, if any of you are green or yellows, I can could be persuaded to send you the Slide decks I have created.

I would recommend that if you are serious about getting you ASQ Black Belt to use the QC of I material in comparison to some of the other materials out there.

 

Yes... I know... The initial thread title was fucked...

Six Sigm and Qaulity Management is probably not the best spelling

Edited December 21, 2018 by Laxtonto

[Hagbard Celine 10852]

Qauilty is not 99.999999%

[Hagbard Celine 10852]

And neither is Six Sigm.

[Surly Bevo 24908]

You DMAIC'd the shit out of that thread title didn't you OP?

[Laxtonto 12078]

Dyslexic as Fuck and been working with plenty of beer this evening

[freyguy 4264]

ppb is archaic.  Single digit fails is where it's at.

[Celery Man 20933]

i have sixty nines of availability

[Johnny Chimpo 478]

I’m a green belt. At my company it’s total bullshit. You fudge some numbers to make yourself look good on your annual performance review, everyone has a party about it. Nobody even bothers getting into the details of did it really make a difference. 

[Laxtonto 12078]

14 hours ago, Johnny Chimpo said:

I’m a green belt. At my company it’s total bullshit. You fudge some numbers to make yourself look good on your annual performance review, everyone has a party about it. Nobody even bothers getting into the details of did it really make a difference. 

Yeah, that screams of a company that needs to do a new type of QM initiative...

The real reason why companies change QM approach is not so people learn new stuff, but instead so they force a redo in both structure and leadership from the old way to cull out the “I don’t give a fuck” view that comes when leadership/management stop paying attention 

[Neonmoon 38129]

My company introduced Lean and Six Sigma. I think most people are fine with it, and to be honest, the issue was never identifying issues or eliminating waste, it’s always been someone having the balls to make a decision and eliminate the waste. However, I would say the one thing that no one likes are the MBA jerkoffs who have zero technical knowledge who just hang around trying to find something to do every day. I don’t mean this as an insult to the OP either. I’m just providing real world feedback. It’s one thing to have someone who’s qualified to do a certain job who additionally becomes a Lean expert, but to throw some random MBA person into your group, it’s like having an embedded reporter. You have to hold their hand and explain everything to them, and all they really do is slow things down or become a glorified secretary. 

 

[Laxtonto 12078]

1 hour ago, Neonmoon said:

My company introduced Lean and Six Sigma. I think most people are fine with it, and to be honest, the issue was never identifying issues or eliminating waste, it’s always been someone having the balls to make a decision and eliminate the waste. However, I would say the one thing that no one likes are the MBA jerkoffs who have zero technical knowledge who just hang around trying to find something to do every day. I don’t mean this as an insult to the OP either. I’m just providing real world feedback. It’s one thing to have someone who’s qualified to do a certain job who additionally becomes a Lean expert, but to throw some random MBA person into your group, it’s like having an embedded reporter. You have to hold their hand and explain everything to them, and all they really do is slow things down or become a glorified secretary. 

 

That’s a standard start up problem if you have any sort of quality initiative with some form of capital or workforce constraint. 

It is not an unusual complaint and is something that should (hopefully) go away over time if they have a legit internal training schedule in place.

I hate to somewhat side with management on shit like this, but experienced quality personnel within specific fields are going to be expensive (and sometimes time prohibitive to fill) so they grab the supposed quality expert fresh out of college and pray that after a few projects they learn the field.

Perfect world you hire experienced everything and let them do their job and do it well. Next best concept is to spend on good experienced top guys and hire a few fresh grads and then train train train. 

Worst case if just hire fresh grads and let them loose on their own and watch the world burn.

 

What should be happening is that they hire a few fresh MBAs and then also grab a few field content experts from within and then train the hell out of both groups so that you have a set of highly technical members that are learning the ins and outs of the quality initiatives all the while having some fresh MBAs learning the concepts from guys that know the field backwards and forwards. Unfortunately that takes time to be successful and very simply you will have lots of churn to get a group that works. The hardest issue is actually identifying who just isn’t going to “get it” and culling them out as soon as you can.

Its the simple concept of if it was easy everyone would be an expert. Quality is hard to do well because it requires both sides of the coin; excellence in understanding how the principles of how quality works and excellence in the process itself.

I feel your pain, and your issue is not uncommon and one of the primary drivers of why there are so many headaches with quality and getting buyin. 

Good luck!

[jeevsie 3733]

Speaking from the manufacturing world, we like the fact that we use our own best practices to create our own Quality system.  We're not tied to an ISO system that doesn't allow flexibility to change. Lean concepts are used.  But most of all, just run a clean facility and communicate.

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

17 minutes ago, jeevsie said:

Speaking from the manufacturing world, we like the fact that we use our own best practices to create our own Quality system.  We're not tied to an ISO system that doesn't allow flexibility to change. Lean concepts are used.  But most of all, just run a clean facility and communicate.

This is perfect. ISO is a nightmare in practice but the principles are sound.

[Laxtonto 12078]

I come out of a pure Prod Ops backgrounders before I went into consulting or then academia.

I teach six sigma because it is what is popular in my region and works well for the students , but I am more of an internal quality guy myself. From a consulting standpoint I have seen all sorts of quality platforms pushed, but in the end it is the structure imposed, universal buyin, and applied problems solving concepts that make the quality programs go.

 

The names are to me meaningless. It is a lot like analytics and the shifting terminology.  

I am not a fan of the headache ISO, but the concepts are very sound. ISO is tedious and full of hoops to jump through, but it sometimes it’s in its own way.  It is like going up for the Baldridge Award; it is not really done for quality itself, but for the doors it opens.