Years ago, an article in the Society of Manufacturing Engineers magazine made an argument I’ve never quite let go of. The author, Geoffrey Mika, set out to debunk the idea that Lean plus Six Sigma adds up to one thing…
By Mike Lopez: Before Lean, many of the activities that are presently structured as Lean projects used to take place anyway. They flew under corporate radar because the communication pathway was not established to let management know about these grassroots…
East Valley Tribune | Daily Arizona news for Chandler, Gilbert, Tempe, Mesa, Scottsdale It’s not often we read about manufacturing work coming back from Asia to the U.S. (my now-former home of Phoenix). ON Semiconductor named a number of factors,…
Six Sigma Stigma (PDF) Here’s an article from Fast Company magazine. The author visited Toyota in Japan and asked a somewhat uninformed question: Eager to show we knew a thing or two about quality ourselves, we soft-balled our hosts with the…
In his article “Putting Six Sigma in Perspective”[1], Michael Hammer uses the mantra:”Use the right tool for the right problem”. An excerpt that summarizes what he means (he uses the term “process redesign”, which in this context is synonymous with…
Six Sigma Blog The Six Sigma Blog has a link to a review of the Michael George book, Lean Six Sigma for Service. Please check out my main blog page at www.leanblog.org The RSS feed content you are reading is…
Quality Digest Magazine: Another article by Jamie Flinchbaugh and Paul Mullenhour, of the Lean Learning Center. They outline failure modes, including: “One major way of failing is to do this improvement work strictly for the sake of lean or the…
