Dec 25 2019
Your Lean Six Sigma Belt Program Is the Problem | Dan Markovitz | Industry Week
“I visited a company a few weeks ago that asks all of their employees to do a green belt project. It’s not mandatory, but completion of a project is part of their annual review. Not surprisingly, the management boasts that nearly everyone does a project. You know how many people do a second project? Less than 5%. This company is doing okay, but they definitely don’t have a culture of continuous improvement.”
Source: Industry Week
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Dan’s article is spot on, except in his assessment of statistical tools. Depending on the company’s situation, none of the ones he lists may be needed. Other tools, like SMED, cell design, mistake-proofing or JKK may be more relevant. Data science is needed in semiconductors and pharmaceuticals but the statistical tools Dan describes as “advanced” are not. ANOVA, regression, and t-tests go back 100 years; Design Of Experiments (DOE), a good 50. As for Ishikawa’s “7 tools of QC” from the 1960s, I have never seen them used as advertised anywhere. They are sorely in need of an update in every respect, from data acquisition to analysis and presentation.
#leansixsigma, #blackbelts, #datascience,#7toolsofqc
Jan 6 2020
Kei Abe, unsung Japanese genius | Hansjörg Wyss | Swiss Made
Swiss Made is a 2013 book by James Breiding and Gerhard Schwarz about the successes of Swiss companies. It came to my attention for a paragraph that celebrates the contributions of my mentor Kei Abe as a consultant to Synthes and its charismatic CEO Hansjörg Wyss. As I was with Kei Abe on several occasions at Synthes and witnessed his interactions with Wyss and with engineers, I can attest that the following quote from the book is true:
The book’s authors are journalists and had embellished the story with untrue statements that I edited out. No, Kei Abe was not a professor and never claimed to have “established the Kanban system” at Toyota. He was an aeronautics engineer from Tokyo University who went to work as a motorcycle designer for Honda, later joined the JMA and started his own consulting group, Management & Technology Japan in 1984, where I joined him in 1987.
On my last visit to Synthes, in Switzerland and without Kei, I remember pointing to a machine in a cell and telling my host “This looks like Kei’s handy work.” He confirmed that it had indeed been based on his input.
#synthes, #keiabe, #hansjoergwyss, #leanmanufacturing
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By Michel Baudin • Web scrapings • 2 • Tags: Hansjörg Wyss, Kei Abe, Lean, Synthes