Quality Companion Supports Quality Improvement

(This guest post was written by Cate Twohill, product marketing manager at Minitab. To learn more about Quality Companion, click on the box on the right.)

A few years ago, I co-authored a white paper outlining The Three Keys to Six Sigma Success.  The paper concluded that, by focusing on the key principles of project selection, securing executive support, and executing the DMAIC method, quality practitioners could increase their overall project success rate. This is proven to be true time and again.

I know what you’re thinking: “OK, but these principles are neither ground-breaking nor new”—and you’d be correct. But what was fairly new at the time was Minitab’s process improvement software, Quality Companion. The all-in-one application supports continuous improvement activities across different levels of a quality program as well as many stages of improvement projects. By summarizing our voice of the customer research into a white paper, we were able to easily draw parallels between the keys for success and Companion’s features, tools, and forms.

Since then, Quality Companion has been updated with Lean Six Sigma support features, including Value Stream Mapping, and its user community continues to grow as does Minitab’s plans for ongoing software enhancements.

So, now you’re probably thinking: “Why is she writing about Lean and Six Sigma on a website that’s focused on Baldrige?”

Because, at their core, Lean, Six Sigma, and the Baldrige model are all systematic approaches to performance excellence. Regardless of the methodology in which you’re…