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
Dec 25 2021
Always the Hurricanes Blowing
Atlantic hurricanes hurt people and destroy property around the Gulf of Mexico every year. Whether climate change is increasing their frequency is a serious question. Don Wheeler just had a column on this subject in the latest Quality Digest. It’s about Torturing the Data. He argues that we should be careful about not force-fitting models to arrive at pre-ordained conclusions.
His way of not torturing the history of hurricanes in the Atlantic is plotting yearly counts on, what else, an XmR chart. It’s just as he would for hole diameters in metal plates coming off a production line in 1945. Hurricanes and holes in metal plates, however, have different backstories.
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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 2 • Tags: Backstory, data science, Hurricane, NOAA, Seasonality, Trend, XmR