Qualtec's Business Performance Improvement Blog

It is often said “free training is not always good, and good training is not always free”, and for the most part this holds true time and time again. But I have also heard the expression “Win-Win” and I firmly believe there is always a win-win out there, so how do we use our creative imagination to combine the two and help our organizations?

I’m talking about finding a partner that has as much to gain through the development of a skilled workforce as you do, but has deeper pockets and can achieve economies of scale far beyond what a company can- I am talking specifically about the state and federal government grants available for training.

You want productivity gains for your business without the expense of overhead or additional manpower, and the states want companies to remain committed to thier communities and viable going concerns that pay taxes and create jobs – I see a Win-Win. Take a look around and ask what is out there for your organization, Continual Improvement and Lean Six Sigma are designed to support bottom line activities with direct and measurable payback that can be easily translated those metrics that are important to those writing the grants and awarding the dollars at the local and state level.

I’ll let you in on a secret…. behind these grants are good people actively looking for a good investment.  Behind the money is an individual not unlike you or I that would love to find a viable company, give them grant money and show the success through job retention or promotion of participants.  It allows them to stride proudly into their place of work and say “ I found that company… I gave a grant to that company”.  These people are out there and they are looking for the same things in a client that you look for in your best clients. And when they find it they want to fund it.

Fundamentally it is simple to do, define what you want…seek out a grant that matches your needs. Some are competitive, some are bound in a certain dollar amount and some have very precise stipulations about what the money can and cannot be used for… but just as there are cars for every driver, there are grants for every business. Grants do not always have to be about promotion, hiring or overhead, they sometimes can be simply job retention or more often than not they can be about marketability of the workforce in the event of an economic downturn…define how the grant will judge success and then make sure you meet your mark.  Use the same concepts discussed in Pay-as-You-Go to build a case just like you would for your management team.

Here is another secret… shoot for what seems impossible. If you are playing on the edge there is less competition, there is a saying that after $500K it gets easier. This is because companies do not think the grants are out there, or their needs for the deployment do not come close to the amount. Don’t let this dissuade you as a company from seeking the win-win and using someone else’s money to train your employees and kick off your Six Sigma or Lean initiatives. States are just as competitive for business bids as individual business is for customers and if you reach out the response will be overwhelming, just begin with the end in mind and know what you are looking for and what you are willing to give in return.  Finally talk to your service provider, if they know what you are attempting to do they can tailor a training plan to meet your grant requirements and define the metrics to make sure you appease the ones that funded the grant.

our Lean Quickstart Presentation for an overview of Lean and Six Sigma, now they work together, and how they may be deployed.

In conclusion lean and Six Sigma address all of the key indicators grant requirements look for  profitability, waste reduction, labor retention, job promotion…etc.etc. Use this to your advantage and seek  win-win with the local governments, as an alternative you may be able to create a co-op of similar non-competitive businesses to fund the match  on the training and collaborate in the projects to off-set the costs, all of this is possible and has been done before,  it is only limited by your organization’s creative imagination and commitment.  If you’d like to know how we did this successfully for my company, contact me.

“We can’t decide whether to do Lean or Six Sigma …”.  I’m still surprised how many times I hear this, much in the same context of whether to get a Camaro or a Mustang.   There is still this misconception that Lean and Six Sigma are competing methodologies, and that you have to opt for one camp or the other based on some arbitrary preferences. 

The CI consulting industry is partly responsible for this, no doubt.  Lean shops push Lean  — Six Sigma shops have all kinds of reasons why Six Sigma is the be-all end-all.   Then the waters were muddied further with the introduction of this thing called Lean Six Sigma, which weaves the lean tools through DMAIC methodology. 

So, if you’re a business leader with real problems and real opportunities, how do you make a smart decision, one that has a good chance to deliver a solid ROI and bottom line results?   

The simple answer is Let your business tell you what makes sense.   We did a recent post that touched on the concept of letting the business pull your CI approach vs. pushing a one size fits all approach, a good example of Lean thinking itself.  We have a very structured assessment model we use when we help our customers design CI programs, but the waters can start to clear with some simple questions …

1. What kinds of business problems do I need to solve?  Do I have clear quality and defect issues that are hurting the business?  Are they complicated problems, where you really don’t know what’s happening?    Or, am I really trying to increase efficiency, make things run faster, and at a lower cost?   Quality and defect issues may tilt the scales toward Six Sigma.  Efficiency, cycle time, flow almost always point to lean.
2. When it comes to process maturity and availability of data, where is my organization, really?  Six Sigma is heavily dependent on measurement and analysis of detailed data to get to root cause. What happens if you really don’t have a lot of data, and have a lot of processes that are messy and unstable?  Projects that take a VERY long time to complete, if they ever complete, is a likely scenario.  In this case, then maybe you should look to lean to clean up and stabilize processes, establish some measurement systems, and get some quick results before moving into Six Sigma.
3. Am I under major budget and time constraints?  Six Sigma can yield some incredible breakthrough results when done correctly, but it takes some upfront investment, in money, resources, and time.   Lean is typically simpler, projects tend to be more incremental, upfront costs are less, and results (albeit in smaller bites) come quicker.
4. Do I have leadership buyin and active participation?  Getting Six Sigma off the ground really requires some support and infrastructure.  If you have that buyin, there are typically some major gains to be had.   If you don’t, and need to do things more from a grass roots perspective, then lean might be a better answer.
5. Am I under pressure to show real operational improvements, NOW?  If so, then I’d take a hard look at lean as a starting point.

our Lean Quickstart .ppt.  There is a short section that provides a high level overview of the differences between Lean and Six Sigma.

Now, before all you purists get mad at me, I know this is overly simplistic.  Did you see all the “may” and “maybes”?   But, you have to admit it is very practical and does provide some realistic guidance, a starting point at least. 

Of course, no single one of these questions should be looked at in a vacuum, but I think if you look at all of them in total, you can get some clarity on what might be the best place to start, whether it be Lean, Six Sigma, or a blended Lean Six Sigma approach.  And, remember, different organizations within the company will likely be in different places.  That’s OK.   Remember, be flexible, and let the business pull the CI approach/tools that make sense. Good results will follow ….

As always, I welcome your feedback and thoughts.   Email me if you’d like to discuss in more detail.

I remember all too well when companies would be told they needed to “be a Six Sigma company” and to do so they had to subscribe to a formula requiring strict percentages of their employee population be trained as Master Black Belts, Black Belts, Green Belts and Yellow Belts.  In addition, the definitions of the knowledge those people required was equally strictly enforced.  Companies were told achieving these goals would make them a Six Sigma company and being a Six Sigma company would make them successful with their customers and shareholders. 

Anyone that lived through the last 15 years of evolution in the field of Operational Excellence can recognize the folly of this prescription.  With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious the program can’t dictate to the business.  And in all honesty, I don’t wish to pick on any singular subject area.  We’ve seen the same sin from many other philosophies and disciplines.  In the excitement generated by a successful new tool or compilation of tools, we tend to pursue the expertise ahead of resolution of our problems.

As we enter a new business cycle, let’s bring all our knowledge together and recalibrate how we choose to apply it by putting the problem or portfolio of problems first.  To avoid having a snazzy tool take over what we do each day, we recommend the following path;

• Understand where you want to go.
• Understand where you are…which has two aspects; (i) your level of performance and (ii) your ability to improve performance
• Let the comparison between where you want to go and where you are currently performing define what you need to accomplish
• Let the comparison between what you need to accomplish and your ability to improve dictate what new capability you need to acquire.

 Our BPM Overview Presentation.

When you are finished outlining the steps above, you will see something quite different than formulaic curriculum and percentages of your population to be trained.  In fact, the solution will not appear simple or fast.  And therefore it will not be as appealing as the aforementioned formula or any other formula from the array of philosophies available in the profession.  The plan that emerges is a function of applying a series of decision rules more than simply measuring the ingredients of a recipe. 

But think about the obvious logic of the outcome.  Your business isn’t simple.  If it were, everyone would do it.  If your business isn’t simple, how can a solution to your challenges be simple.  The complexity of the solution will match the complexity of the problem.

So how and where do you start?  How do you bring order to the chaos?  The answer lies in the definition of your projects, the identification of their root causes and in grouping them together by root cause so as to build a roadmap forward.  The complexity is in the selection and prioritization of projects. The simplification comes in executing on the projects.

I spoke to an executive at a company yesterday that described the old process as creating angst.   The word itself gives you heartburn.  When I asked him what gave rise to the angst, he responded that the discipline had been forced fit.  What can you say to such powerful words as those?

If those are the feelings the prior model drove, what do we strive for today?  We strive to “PULL” the required knowledge.  We believe anyone pursuing the path above should one day describe it using words such as choice and flexible.  The emotion we hope to see at the end is relief.  That is the new paradigm. 

If participants should one day replace the words “Forced Fit” with “Choice” and “Flexibility” and the word “Angst” with “Relief”, what should we see at a business level?  Well, here are some key results that should be witnessed.

• Faster returns.  While the long path is more complex, the milestones become simpler so measured returns should be faster. The simple formula of ten years ago is monolithic and so the returns can’t be measured for a long time.  In fact, the fallacy of the monolithic argument is partly hidden by the time spectrum as you are asked not to measure for months if not years.   (A key aspect of this is discussed in our recent article “Pay as you Go”).  Armada v. Drake’s English fleet.
• Organizational Traction.  Creating a ladder of success ensures Organizational Traction by producing “wins” and establishing a foundation of knowledge and capability to tackle tougher problems.  So many Performance Improvement strategies talk about resolving the big chronic problems.  But pursuing them right from the beginning is fraught with risk. And pursuing resolution to smaller problems with the tools you need to solve big problems takes too much time and effort which is wasteful for individuals and the organization.
• Alignment.  If you adopt a Pull strategy, you can’t help but be aligned.  Your business defines your problems which in turn define your program.  As a result, your activities are ensured to be aligned to your business.  Leadership needs to see resources dedicated to the problems they are trying to resolve.  We are all living in an environment where we must do more with less.  There is no room for unaligned activities.  Pursuing a philosophy for its own sake is a luxury no company can afford.

We see this happening every day now.  Listening to the organization and being flexible produces more of the right gains faster than talking to the organization and forcing it to fit a prescription.  Individuals get more involved with something that produces relief instead of creating angst.  Pull is significantly more effective than Push.  Let the business needs and ability define the improvement program.

Contact me if you’d like to discuss this in more detail.

A core commandment of my philosophy toward Quality Management Systems is that the QMS is not separate from the business environment, but rather just another facet of the business. This leads us to the idea that there is no room in the QMS for non-value added activities, however due to the segregation of the systems, much of the time Quality Auditing is seen as just that… non-value added. Historically this is not an untrue view, as previous quality systems relied on a complex checklist that only scratched the surface of a process, and provided little or no value to the organization.  For this reason my next few posts will deal more specifically with how Six Sigma and other Continuous Improvement  techniques and methods can be used to achieve the GOAL of certification while actually adding value to the business.

Our Complimenary Executive Brief on how Yellow Belts can play a key role in Quality and CI programs

                To re-affirm my stance, certification is the GOAL, how you get there is up to you; coincidentally what you have to work with at the end is your choice as well (for good or bad). This week we will focus on the application of Six Sigma Yellow belts as the foundation of an Internal Audit Program, a requirement of ISO 9001. This applies to all of the System and process audits that ISO9001 requires, product audits are a whole other animal.   In his post “What can Yellow Belts do…really” Eric Harris hit on a few key roles for Yellow Belts in a Six Sigma organization, these were:

1. Characterization of processes
2. Establish/ Validate Measurement Systems
3. Establish process Control Systems
4. Perform Small Scope  projects

                 In ISO 9001:2008 the requirement is to have an internal audit program with qualified auditors. Now if you are looking to add value to your organization doesn’t it seem most advantageous to have an auditor with the skills listed above. Training an “internal auditor” traditionally revolves around a lengthy class of standards exploration, leaving them competent to fill out their checklist and audit to the “shalls” in the standard, but what value are you really getting from these “checklist jockeys”? Wouldn’t it make sense to have your auditor explore the process map, improve the process and continually push the process to new levels? Yellow Belts can do this, and this is more powerful than you realize due to the fact that you are actually performing Continual Improvement (a requirement of the ISO standard) and at the same time knocking out the requirements for ISO 9001:2008 relating to internal auditing….. This is a multiple win when coupled with the below suggestions:

1. Use your Yellow Belts as your Internal Audit staff, the standard is easy to learn and application is simple.
2. Use your auditors to follow the process through using a process map highlighting the non-value added steps and constraints to feed into your CI activities
3. In the event of an audit NC to the standard the Yellow Belt can assist the auditees in performing true systemic correction with adequate measurement systems, their mentoring can provide sustainable change in an organization, and this is a huge cultural change win!

             This in the end comes down to a fundamental decision as management: Do I have a Yellow Belt that knows the standard, or someone that knows the standard more completely but cannot help me along my way? In my humble view I feel there is more value derived from an individual familiar with process improvement that knows what the process must do, rather than someone that can recite the standard but cannot improve process and metric. As mentioned above, the GOAL is ISO certification… how you get there is up to you. What you do to meet the requirement for internal auditing can very well make the difference between having to add overhead and cost to meet the requirement, or multiplying the power of your CI activities in a way that happens to meet the requirement. In the end the results you end up with are exactly what you have set yourself up for ….. Which will it be?   If you wish to discuss contact me.

I was thrilled when I was offered to contribute to SSQi’s blog and share my thoughts and opinions with such a diverse and influential audience, but then I had to consider what to write about. A focus of recent posts is the ability to do more with less in the current reality in which we find ourselves, which is both a challenging and wonderful place to be. I say challenging because of the obvious competition for priorities and resource allocation, but wonderful because it is this “steel-sharpens-steel” approach that drives innovation. We can only grow in an environment outside of our comfort zone, and this is a country that thrives in the area of adaptation and evolution at every expansion of boundary. While the manufacturing floor is changing to more and more a specialized lean-based methodology the quality expectations are being pushed to new boundaries by customers more able to eloquently and specifically express their needs and wants in terms of specifications (both written and implied). However a company’s QMS is not evolving with the changing times and tools to continue to be a useful relevant tool for an organization.

our Complimenary Executive Brief on how Yellow Belts can play a key role in Quality and CI programs

A company’s Quality Management System is perhaps more vital than a customer’s perception of quality because of the intimate relationship it has on every aspect of the business, yet it is constantly given second class treatment with external and manufacturing processes taking precedent in a crowded environment of scarce resource. A company’s QMS forms the structure of how a company realizes the products and services it manufactures, it is in effect the vehicle for change. ISO 9001 has made great strides to bring about a process perspective, yet the application is still very much rooted in the perception of overhead intensive systems. Processes must be made simpler within the QMS, measures must be formulated to judge processes from the customer perspective (i.e. what is the average cycle time for a customer corrective action implementation… and is that an acceptable number?). How much redundancy is present in repetitive loops and data transfer (how many times do we record the same information)… a common theme I hear from company to company is “add”. We can no longer add, no more than it would be acceptable to “add” a non-value added step to manufacturing process to compensate for a failure.

Addition is the antithesis of innovation; addition is a poor substitute for failure to really think outside the box in a QMS. We need to be smarter, face the challenge and set a basic premise that we will no longer “add”, but rather “evolve”. Now don’t misunderstand me, some processes need an EVOLUTION, and some need a REVOLUTION, and it is up to each business to decide which is appropriate. Whichever one it chooses the fundamental task is a simplification to the raw requirements of the customer, and for the QMS that is the organization. Turn the tools of Six Sigma inward on your QMS, help yourselves through the core competency that you turn to in a manufacturing crunch, and in doing this your system will be leaner, require less maintenance and ultimately fit within the new reality in which we all find ourselves. If we do not then we risk failing to meet the customer demand through failure to help ourselves…but more on that in subsequent postings.  If you wish to discuss, feel free to contact me.

We’ve been blogging regularly and published a white paper about the use of social media tools in learning. The central thesis has been that our economic environment demands continued, and even accelerated, learning while the traditional costly and time consuming paradigm of training isn’t meeting our needs. Take a look at On Demand Performance Improvement and Economically Delivering the Right Mix of Lean, Six Sigma and Business Process Management. Do our writings have merit or are they simply futuristic musings? Well take a look at this You Tube video entitled Did You Know?

Those of us that are going to make it to the other side must learn new skills and will use technology differently to do so. We’ll learn to do something by going to You Tube to find a video; by using search engines to find the knowledge we want when we want to apply it; and by asking our network of friends, family and colleagues using FaceBook and LinkedIn. Socially connected in the business world does not mean going to lunch together, it means peer learning and sharing. Almost all knowledge will be new in the sense that it will be continually learned. We are excited about this prospect. Continuous learning is essential and we have the means by which to provide it.

My colleagues and I have written about this subject from several angles I want to start bringing it togetter.  In my post On Demand Performance Improvement  and Lynn Monkelien’s, Senior Director of Enterprise Learning at the Apollo Group and SSQ guest blogger, post entitled Pull Learning in Business Process and Performance Improvement we discussed how to break the paradigm of training inefficiencies.  This was further supported in my white paper entitled On Demand Performance Improvemnt – Traditional Training Meets Social Media which is available on our website’s home page in the “spotlight” section.  Then my colleague, Eric Harris wrote Back to Basics where he introduced the various foundation aspects of Yellow Belt, Lean and Business Process Management.   Since then there have been numerous posts on each of these subjects. 

Together we are all describing a new training paradigm that is emerging where with our clients we not only making better use of technology and social media standards but also of a contemporary and robust library of materials and broad capability of personnel to meet the contemporary needs of organizations.  Specifically, with so much pressure on costs and the limited availability of company personnel’s time, it’s not surprising that most companies are looking hard at how and what they delivery to their workforce.  The key is to define what is needed… nothing more and nothing less…in terms of both content and exposure.  And that is done by matching the depth of training to the problems the organization seeks to address and putting the information into the users hands in as many low cost forms as possible as close to the actual application as possible. 

Here are some factors to consider when asking what training and coaching is needed:

* Are you addressing manufacturing, engineering or transactional processes?  In factories and laboratories where much of the improvement activity may focus on equipment, techniques such as Gauge R&R, Process Capability, Setup Reduction, Total Productive Maintenance and perhaps even Design of Experiments are invaluable.  But in transactional businesses, they can be substituted with more impactful subjects.

* Are you dealing with high-volume repetitive processes?  Much of the Lean training can be simplified and reduced if you are not.  Value Stream Mapping, for example, can be covered at a more general level.

* What is the objective and the environment?  Are you attempting to remove defects or reduce cycle time?  If you seek to reduce errors in a financial services company, the focus is on process analysis so Pareto Charts, Run Charts and the like, which are quick and easy to teach, become the focus.

And here are some questions to ask when considering how to get the chosen information to the user:

* What sort of time is available from the targeted personnel? Can they spend a day in a classroom or is thier time limited to hours per day or per week? Will targeted candidates be in different locations or at one facility?

* Do you know exactly what thier problems require or will it evolve over time? 

* Are they comfortable with technology and social media?

 The point is that you have choices.  You can follow a fairly standardized prescription for Lean Six Sigma training as described through the classic belt definitions or you can tailor your training to unique needs.  At the same time, you can perform standard instructor lead training or you can use various communication tools that leverage technologies and social media standards. 

I have one note of caution –if you cut the content or instructor interaction too far, the price for the mistake doesn’t immediately show itself during the training.  Problems evidence themselves once the training is well underway or completed.  And the problems might be that projects get delayed, more coaching is needed to complete high value projects or certified candidates fail in follow-on projects.  The result is a general loss of confidence emerges for the whole process.  By the time you discover your mistake, the effort is deemed a failure.  We don’t say this to scare you into overbuying or overdesigning.  We believe the answer is to monitor the situation closely and maintain flexibility in both the training and support.  It is in this reaction time that modular content and flexible, technology enabled support tools and methods really make a difference.

If you would like to discuss this emerging model, contact me.

As a followup to my recent post titled Trained Yellow Belts Think Differently, I thought I would spend a little time talking about what yellow belts can actually DO.

In a traditional six sigma deployment, yellow belts play a critical role in supporting higher level black belt and green belt projects.  They are trained in the foundation of the DMAIC problem solving process and can speak the language of Six Sigma.  They can handle some of the lower level tasks of process mapping, data collection, setting up measurement systems, establishing and maintaining control systems , and may actually be subject matter experts. Basically, they allow the black belts and green belts to focus on the more complex analytical aspects of the project.  If yellow belts are used effectively, they can improve the productivity of black belts and green belts in a BIG way.

BUT, what can they do outside of supporting higher level belts?   What if you don’t even have higher level belts?  What can a yellow belt trained employee do for the organization? 

Six Sigma purists might argue that Yellow Belts should not be trained, without Black Belts and Green Belts, and that their role is to support higher level belts.  I don’t agree with this at all.   Again, I have to hedge by saying that I’m talking about the level of capability that yellow belts trained by SSQ have (i.e. 4-5 days of training).   So, what can Mr. Yellow Belt do?

• Characterize Processes.  Process mapping and characterization is a skill that should not be taken lightly.  All too often,  improvements are made to processes when we don’t know how the current process really operates, the current state.  These so-called improvements, in many cases, add unnecessary complexity and create more problems than they fixed.  We call this tampering and it is a sure-fire recipe for disaster.  A great example of where process characterization is an invaluable skill is with large-scale enterprise software implementations.   It seems common sense that we should understand exactly how a process works before we try to systemize/automate with software, right?  How often is there really a focused effort to characterize and optimize processes?   I would argue not enough of the time and this is readily apparent in the big $’s spent on configuration, customization, tweaks, etc.
• Establish/validate measurement systems. Yellow belts learn the basics of Six Sigma and its focus on using data to understand problems and get to the root cause.  The learn the basics of what makes a good measurement system, and what does not.    The can certainly help establish measurement and data collection systems that are actionable, and validate (or invalidate) existing ones.
• Establish Process Control Systems.  This is a key yellow belt skillset and its importance should not be overlooked.  Yellow belts learn how to set up process control systems to assure that processes function as expected by the customer.  Spec limits are establish, as are response plans when an indicator goes out of control 
• Execute small scale improvement projects in their own areas.   Will they have the deep statistical analysis skills that well-trained green belts or black belts have?  No, they will not.  But they will have a solid problem solving foundation around DMAIC and they will have a working knowledge of the basic tools in D-M-A-I-C.  They know what a well scoped project looks like, they know the basic measure and analyze graphical tools, they know how to use a structured approach to select improvements, and they definitely know about process control systems.   Let’s not lose site of the fact that these basic tools will likely be sufficient to address a significant portion of the process problems you’ll face.  

Some may think of Yellow Belts as team members, data collectors, or assistants to Black Belts.  I strongly question this view and think, in reality, a Yellow Belt’s role should be much deeper than that.  Yellow Belts practice a Process Management approach (control and manage processes using metrics and data) and can solve real business problems using basic, but proven, quality tools and a systematic approach.  

Yellow belt skills are valuable at any level of the organization, from managers to the lowest level process operators, and the processes they improve are usually the ones they work in day in and day out.  Many years back the term daily process management was in vogue.  The term has certainly faded a bit, but it’s hard to argue against the value of actively managing and improving processes on a daily basis.

Contact me if you’d like to talk about how yellow belts might be able to help your organization.  And, if you haven’t already, download our yellow belt training manual to see for yourself the rich skillset a yellow belt acquires.

We’ve been offering a complimentary download of our Yellow Belt training manuals on our website for a couple of weeks and the response has been extremely positive.   Of course, some people just want to download something that is free.  However, the majority of people are genuinely interested in Six Sigma and process improvement in general, and are looking for ways to bring some foundation capability into their organizations.  From the conversations I have, it is clear that the need for basic process improvement hasn’t gone away, but the way companies are willing to build the capability has certainly changed.  I did a recent post that talks about how companies are moving back to the basics when it comes to CI, basics that are inexpensive and deliver results to a broad base of the organization.

Now, many of the people that are downloading have heard the term yellow belt and are curious about what a yellow belt skillset is.  But I’m seeing that a lot of people don’t have a good feel for exactly what a yellow belt does and how it can benefit the organization.  So, I’m going to provide some thoughts here and on some subsequent posts. 

As a disclaimer, there is really no standard out there for what a yellow belt knows.  I’m talking about our (Qualtec’s) definition of a yellow belt skillset.  For us, yellow belt training is usually delivered as 4-5 days of training.

Yellow Belts really should think and act differently after training so, let’s first talk about what yellow belts should be thinking about after training:

• Analyzing real data to drive business decisions, analyzing root cause to drive implementation of the right solutions, and understanding that CI (Lean, Six Sigma, BPM, etc) is all about improving business performance in terms of voice of the customer.
• Identifying and tracking the right metrics (primary, secondary, etc), really understanding process capability and process performance.
• How to practically get and use data and a scientific approach to solve a problem?
• Understanding what a problem is really costing the business, the real cost-of-poor-quality (COPQ)
• Putting in the proper process control mechanisms to sustain improvements over time …
• The project selection and prioritization process of the company to assure that the right things are being targeted, things that will make an impact.

The Yellow Belt skillset is a foundation set of quality improvement and process control tools.  It is something that can be applied anywhere in the organization and on any process to yield wide-ranging improvements.  It is one approach, and an effective one for many, to building a solid foundation for CI in their organization.

Contact me if you want more info or would like to discuss in more detail ….

As my focus is on process improvement, I often get into dialogues about benchmarking and the importance of it.  Wikipedia describes benchmarking as the process of comparing one’s business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and/or best practices from other industries. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time, and cost.   Just how important are benchmarks to the success of business and process improvement efforts?

Let me pose another question … which is more important: 1)  to meet your customers needs and expectations now or 2)  to look in the rear view mirror and find out how well you stacked up against the competition? I am obviously biased to #1.  Don’t get me wrong, I understand that some companies require benchmarking to justify the investment in a process improvement, but I submit that, if you look closely, you might find that those organizations aren’t as customer-centric as they need to be.

For me, customer feedback (VOC) is more important and, in many cases, it’s far easier to get good data from customer than it is to get good benchmark data. When customers give you consistent feedback over time to tell you that a process does or does not measure-up, that should be all the proof that is needed.

I’m interested in your thoughts. Have you been successful driving a large-scale complex improvement project without benchmarks? Have you used benchmarks successfully to get sponsorship and funding? Have you been able to use the customer voice solely as your rationale for improving?