- - Cummins Incorporated recently held an earnings conference call and they attribute their Q4 2009 earnings to Six Sigma.
We also continue to make heavy use of Six Sigma to drive quality improvements and lower our costs across the company. Our Six Sigma savings in 2009 were nearly $500 million well above our target and all our [...]
- - An article on iSixSigma shows what really goes on with Lean banking. That it is not always a single piece-flow process is true.
Read the article here.
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It’s time again for some link-loving and see what other blogs are saying about Six Sigma, Lean, Lean Six Sigma and other quality improvement processes.
The Business Organizational blog says that Six Sigma is important in business because it takes values much higher than other techniques to improve quality, such as TQM. Read on…
Over at Sigma [...]
- - Some say Toyota’s troubles started with fixation on growth. The company wanted to outgrow the competition as fast as possible.
Read a good discussion about it here: Toyota’s Troubles Started with Fixation on Growth
To be fair to Toyota, I believe the company worked with the best intentions. They were leading for years, and they wanted to [...]
- - In the recently concluded iSixSigma Live! Summit, Starwood Hotels and Resorts landed on the No. 1 spot of iSixSigma’s Top 10 Best Places to Work for Six Sigma professionals.
Jessica Harper, editor of iSixSigma, who presented the award to Brian McGuire, senior director of Hotel Operations and Six Sigma for Starwood’s North America Division said, “Starwood’s [...]
- - Just as it is important to tailor a speech or written argument to the needs of the intended audience, it is important to choose the notation for a QFD that is best suited for its target audience.
- - The addition of concepts such as dependencies is evidence that just like products or services, methodologies need to be continually refined in order to ensure their usefulness.
- - I have received several inquiries about the mechanics of exactly how one blends the voices of conflicting business, consumer, and regulatory groups into a single "VOC" for a Quality Function Deployment. The intent of this article is to answer those inquiries by giving an overview of the two primary processes for blending the requirements from these disparate groups, namely: "Percentage Translation" and "House of Quality Folding".
- - Although the time saved by reducing unnecessary course corrections far outweighs the additional overhead of implementing Quality Function Deployment, there is definitely a significant upfront time investiture associated with the process. However, there are several time saving procedures that QFD teams can utilize to significantly decrease the arduousness associated with the methodology.
- - What is the best tool for prioritizing steps to mitigate potential failures: Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) or the House of Quality (HOQ) tool? Coming from a Quality Function Deployment enthusiast, my answer may surprise you…
- - The House of Quality matrix is an almost universal tool that can be used for prioritizing anything from a family budget to the complex engineering tasks of an automobile manufacturer.
- - The name 'Quality Function Deployment' gives little hint as to what the tool actually is or what purpose it serves. So why is its name so perplexing? The answer lies in two main issues...
- - If cost, complexity, and/or difficulty will affect your prioritization, then before you decide that entering difficulty values is too laborious, perhaps you should instead ask yourself, 'how hard can it be?'
- - There is a sweetener that can assist executive management in swallowing the sometimes bitter pill of 'Agile' development—and that sweetener bears the name 'QFD'.
- - An HOQ can quickly become unwieldy or cease to be useful if requirements are added to it haphazardly or if essential requirements are omitted. Luckily, there are proven guidelines that can assist QFD teams in producing a well-groomed and comprehensive Quality Function Deployment model.