Quality and Innovation

(Image Credit: Doug Buckley of http://hyperactive.to)

Are you an entry-level Young Quality Professional (YQP) who has participated or led a project that resulted in tangible benefits for your organization or community? Are you a student in high school or college who has worked individually, or with a team, to apply quality tools to solve practical problems in your school, or community, or at home? If so, WE WANT YOU to tell us about it!

On Wednesday, May 23rd, we will be conducting a session at the ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement (WCQI) to demonstrate the impact that the newest members of our community – students and entry-level professionals – have had on their organizations, businesses, and communities. This session will consist of vignettes from up to 15 quality or process improvement projects performed by students or entry-level professionals. We’ll be inviting all WCQI attendees to come celebrate the accomplishments of the youngest members of our community, and support them as they progress in their education and in their careers!

HOW TO APPLY: Send an email to Jacob Mayiani Loorimirim (Graduate Assistant, JMU) at loorimjm@dukes.jmu.edu (and cc: simmo2ra@jmu.edu and radziwnm@jmu.edu) with short answers to each of the 6 questions below. Project review started on February 1 and will continue until all slots are filled, or February 29 at the latest.

If your project is selected to be part of the Showcase, we’ll work with you to put together a few slides, audio recordings, and/or video clips that describe the problem you solved, the quality tools and approaches you used, your results, and the impact of your solution on your stakeholders. We plan to spend between 3 and 5 minutes showcasing each project. If you are a student who will be attending the WCQI in person, we would love for you to submit a project that you completed individually or as a team – and talk about it yourself for 2 to 3 minutes during our session!

QUESTIONS:

1. Project completed by: (List your names and ages, and specify whether this was part of a school/university project, for a client, or was done in service to your community; if you had a teacher or faculty advisor, please list them too! Also, let us know if you plan to attend the WCQI in person in Anaheim, CA this May.)

2. Project title:

3. Project start and completion dates:

4. Provide a brief problem statement (1-3 sentences) that summarizes the problem, your stakeholders, and your goals:

5. Provide a brief description of your hands-on performance while completing the project, providing specific examples of the methodologies (e.g. PDSA, DMAIC) and/or tools (e.g. process maps, fishbone diagrams, Pareto charts, affinity diagrams, multivoting/nominal group technique) that you used to solve the problem.

6. In one sentence, describe your project’s RESULTS and the impacts on its stakeholders.

Thank you for your interest! Please forward this announcement by email, Facebook, Twitter, or any other mechanism if you know of a Young Quality Professional (YQP) whose work should be noticed and recognized – or where they might be hanging out.

Sincerely,

Nicole Radziwill, College of Integrated Science & Technology, James Madison University
Rebecca Simmons, College of Business, James Madison University

A couple of weeks ago, I got this email:

Comment: I am basker from NJ, and I have a PMP certification, I want to get a six sigma black belt certification — are there other certifications out there other than one from ASQ ? that you would suggest and what is the cheapest and quickest way to pass the black belt certification ?

Kind Regards,

Basker.

Basker would like to know the quickest and cheapest way to get a Black Belt certification. Here are the routes I know about to obtain the certification: 1) you could go to http://sixsigmaonline.org, whose training and certification program costs about $1000, 2) you could attend the 4-week program offered by http://www.6sigma.us which runs about $8000, 3) you could go to Villanova and pay $7000 for their three-course package, or 4) you can study on your own, complete two projects and get a Project Champion to sign an affidavit, become an ASQ member and pay $299 to take the exam, or don’t become an ASQ member and pay $449 to take the exam.

The ASQ option is probably the quickest and cheapest if you’re good at self study, and dedicated to the task of Six Sigma problem solving. However, with the ASQ certification you also get a lot of clout. I don’t think any other organization has more than 10,000 Black Belts supporting the program, working on updates to the new exams, and keeping the curriculum current. I just personally think it’s a much more viable Black Belt designation than the other programs.

I also asked Jeanine Becker, who works at ASQ in Milwaukee and is responsible for the Six Sigma Forum, what she thought. Jeanine says:

ASQ certification is a formal recognition by ASQ that an individual has demonstrated a proficiency within, and comprehension of, a specific body of knowledge. Nearly 150,000 certifications have been issued to dedicated professionals worldwide.

Anyone can give you a “certificate” for simply attending a course, but an ASQ certification is the recognized gold standard for certification for quality professionals.  ASQ is the only third-party provider of certifications for the quality professional.   Those that are ASQ certified have the potential to earn a higher salary than their counterparts.    The majority of positions companies recruit for that require certifications specify an ASQ certification.

I totally agree. And as a result, Basker, I’d say go with the ASQ cert.

Nicole

I very recently took my ASQ CSSBB exam and passed! Here’s what I think helped me:

1. I studied for about 4 weeks (2 weeks very gently, 1 week much-more-work-because-the-exam-is-getting-closer, and 1 week of panicked, freaked out all nighters) using these great references that I wrote up tons of comments about.

2. I took about 10 pages of really good, concise notes. (I’ll share those with you sometime before the end of the year… want to write them up for public consumption.)

3. I brought about 15 super sharp #2 pencils just in case 14 of them broke. I made sure all the pencils actually SAID #2 on them, so the Scantron machine wouldn’t fail me.

4. I brought my SMART RULER. I’ve had this ruler since the late 1980′s, and every time I’ve taken a tough test, I’ve had my smart ruler with me in case I need to underline anything, or draw dividers between notes. I usually never have to USE the ruler. Usually, its presence is enough to make me do better on any exam.

5. They (the people who say such things) say that peppermint makes you smarter. So I got a new pack of Orbit peppermint gum and chewed it like I had obsessive compulsive disorder for all four hours. (Afterwards I found out that the peppermint thing isn’t really backed up by research, but I didn’t know that going into the exam, so I believed that the peppermint would make my brain work better, and that belief probably helped me out. Got to stack the deck in my favor… didn’t want those 4 weeks of studying NOT to pay off.)

6. When I wasn’t chewing gum, I was nibbling on a Reese’s peanut butter bar. Best 300 calorie investment ever made… the protein made my stomach stop growling so it wouldn’t bother the other test takers.

7. I also brought a couple very cold Diet Cokes, to wash down the peanut butter and the gum taste.

8. To appropriately address my superstitious nature, I wore my Ganesh necklace. In Hindu parlance, Ganesh helps break through obstacles, and I figured the exam that stood between me and CSSBB-hood was definitely an obstacle I wanted broken. (Hey, whatever works, right??)

Nicole

I see a LOT of searches for LSSQTT that get directed to this blog – presumably, these people are searching for the Lean Six Sigma Quality Transformation Toolkit developed by John W. Sinn of Bowling Green State University.

I’d like to ask for you all to leave comments and questions – what, specifically, are you looking for? I have several semesters experience with the toolkit and I “get it” – so I would be very happy to help you if you let me know what you’re looking for. Please leave comments and questions below. Thanks!

The seven types of waste are a foundational concept in lean manufacturing, all forms of muda as described by Taichi Ohno of Toyota. Reducing waste systematically can help you achieve flow in your processes. Waste can result from:

• Overproduction – making too much of something that goes unused, spoils, or collects dust.
• Inventory – keeping too much of something that goes unused, and costs time or money to store.
• Extra Processing – wasting time or effort on steps that are unnecessary.
• Motion – exerting energy to do something that doesn’t create value.
• Defects – products or processes that don’t conform to their specifications.
• Waiting – time spent being unproductive could be used in other ways to create value.
• Transportation – moving things over long distances costs time, effort and money.

In addition to muda, mura (unevenness in production) and muri (overburdening of people and equipment) are also recognized as characteristics of a process that impede flow. Overburdening either people or machines can lead to burnout, which can result in a high repair or replacement cost!

Green Six Sigma, also called “Green Sigma” by IBM, refers to a Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma (LSS) project in which the tangible benefits are also environmentally conscious – such as reducing landfill waste, reducing energy requirements, reducing variation in energy usage, and systematically conserving energy or other natural resources (e.g. water). In addition to the environmental benefits, there are also often cost reductions – trash service can be expensive, especially if the refuse needs to be hauled or special pick-ups must be arranged.

Although the term may be new, the practice is not! One of the pillars of the Toyota Production System, which developed in the early days after World War II, was its aggressive attitude towards waste – Toyota was the first company to achieve zero landfill waste in all of its operations. The tools and techniques of Green Six Sigma are identical to those used in any other LSS project.

In its 18 August 2008 press release “A Measured Approach to Going Green“, IBM describes the “Green Sigma” consulting offering. It’s nice that the company is calling attention to the fact that established methodologies can be used to promote sustainability, but don’t be confused – it’s not a novel approach.

Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is a structured problem-solving approach for improving quality and productivity. Lean approaches focus on improving speed and flow in business processes, which leads to the outcome of reducing waste. Tools such as value stream mapping (VSM), flow diagrams, 8D, FMEA, and OPCP are typically used. Six Sigma methods seek to reduce variation and/or defects in either processes or products. In these cases, methods such as statistical process control, design of experiments, and “Design for X” are often employed. The target metric is typically “Six Sigma”, which represents no more than 3.4 defects for every million opportunities you have to generate a defect. This means that how you define a defect is pretty important!

But what about if you want to take an integrated approach to problem solving, where you think about how reducing waste, reducing variation, and reducing defects are all inter-related? It is in precisely these cases that Lean Six Sigma is so valuable. Pundits advocating Lean will rightly note that Six Sigma methods don’t reduce waste; Six Sigma enthusiasts will point out that Lean can’t help you remove defects or manage variation. But what if the special cause that’s confounding your process is also generating tons of waste? Makes sense to look at the problem holistically, which is what LSS helps you do.

Both Lean and Six Sigma help us identify forces that make our processes unnecessarily complex. It is by rooting out these causes that we achieve the primary goals of LSS: reducing waste, reducing variation, and reducing defects. Using a framework like DMAIC helps us pose the following questions:

• What’s your quality goal? (Hint: choose the most important from the three above)
• How do you define a defect? (Note: this often changes for each new LSS project)
• What tools can you use to achieve that quality goal, given a broad selection of Lean and Six Sigma methods to choose from?

(Specific examples illustrating how to ask and interpret these questions using DMAIC will be presented in future articles, along with a description of how to use the Lean Six Sigma Quality Transformation Toolkit – LSSQTT – to execute your project.)

A successfully completed Lean Six Sigma project will generate a clear tangible value. This could include financial savings, savings in time and effort, reduced costs of materials, improved cash flow, cycle time reduction, or improved (measurable) customer satisfaction. Typically, a single Lean Six Sigma project will improve only one or two of these variables. Don’t try to improve all at once, which could get you bogged down in details. Iteration is the key!