All Posts Tagged With: "Six Sigma"
A Baldrige Legend
Bob Galvin died last week at the age of 89. He ran Motorola, the company his father founded, from 1959 to 1988, transforming it from a national company with sales of $290 million to a global corporation with sales of $10.8 billion.
Galvin helped launch the Baldrige program. Under his leadership, Motorola had become a global quality leader. Six Sigma became a systematic approach to quality improvement at Motorola, where Galvin notoriously demanded 10x improvements in quality and cycle time from one year to the next. In a Financial Executive report, he bragged that “we hardly take a serious interest in less than a 50% improvement” in cycle time. To make his point, he described a Motorola pager that had taken 44 days to make to customer specifications that, through quality and cycle time improvements, was being delivered in less than two hours.
He took these improvements personally. I interviewed him at his office in Schaumberg, Illinois, in 1991 for my first Baldrige book. He talked about lobbying for a national quality award, Motorola receiving one of the first Baldrige Awards given in 1988, and serving on the Baldrige Board of Overseers. But his eyes really lit up when he described his company’s efforts to improve quality and reduce cycle time. He pointed to the “In” basket on his desk, which contained one bound report. He told me he had set a personal cycle time goal to turn around any report that crossed his desk for feedback within 24 hours of receipt and…
17Oct2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedOne Team’s Systematic Approach to Improvement
A recent case study published by ASQ tells the story of how FirstSource Solutions used tools and processes that are common among Baldrige Award winners to tackle a single problem—reducing the turnaround time (TAT) to approve applications for a retail mortgage client—with impressive results.
The client was in the United Kingdom. Here’s a synopsis of how Firstsource tackled the problem:
- It used data to define the problem: Over a nine-week period, the client offered mortgage loans in 14 days or less 69% of the time, well short of the 75% target.
- A financial benefit estimation exercise determined that improving performance on TAT to 80% would increase revenue by six million pounds annually, create a more efficient process, and provide faster service to applicants.
- Firstsource formed a team to improve TAT. The team received training on the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology and quality tools.
- The team started with a supplier-inputs-process-outputs-customer (SIPOC) exercise to create a high-level process map and identify stakeholders.
- The team produced a three-stage analysis road map to assess the current situation and identify possible root causes and improvement activities. It used the road map to agree on five causes of the longer TAT.
- The team brainstormed possible solutions and then assigned a relative rating for each solution to eliminate half of the original possibilities.
- The team validated the impact of the solutions through a one-week pilot study with a metrics dashboard that was shared with all stakeholders involved in developing solutions. Based on their feedback, the team decided to proceed with full implementation.
- The team used PDCA…
What Process-Centered Looks Like
The journey to becoming a process-centered organization begins with all employees in the organization recognizing and focusing on their processes. All employees understand that their work is contributing to the performance of the key process.
This excerpt from Montgomery County Public Schools’ 2010 Baldrige Award-winning application could describe every Baldrige Award winner. All are process centered. A great example of what it means to be process-centered can be found in MCPS’s Road Map to Process Management and Improvement and Knowledge Management, which you can view by clicking on the title of this article or on the blue “Continued” below.
At MCPS, every office, department, and division has identified its key processes, mapped them, used a systematic and systemic model (IGOE: inputs, guides, outputs, and enablers) to identify interrelationships and interdependencies of key processes and staff, and determined how to measure process effectiveness. You can read more about IGOE and process management at MCPS in its application summary here.
All key processes have in-process measures that monitor quality such as rework and errors. And no, MCPS is not a manufacturer: It’s a school system, even though its approaches to process management sound like those of a well-run business. If rework and errors continue, a process team determines which improvement method of PDSA (plan/do/study/act) is appropriate: Lean, Six Sigma, or project management.
In its response to Item 7.5, Process-Effectiveness Outcomes, MCPS provides a one-and-a-half page table that lists its key processes, process requirements, and process improvement results. It’s not an ideal response because it doesn’t show…
12Apr2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedQuality 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 currently engaged, Companion can help you build on that systematic approach and improve how you…
4Apr2011 | Cate Twohill | 0 comments | ContinuedImproving Processes through Observation
When you come across a story that involves process improvement in both education and healthcare at the same time, you have to share it.
The education part is the Executive Master of Public Administration: Concentration for Nurse Leaders program at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. (Let’s see you fit that on a business card.) For their Capstone project, the six people in the program decided to analyze how much time nurses spend getting the equipment they need to get their jobs done.
They carefully observed nursing staff at New-York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center. They wrote down how much time nurses spent with patients. They photographed rooms after patients were discharged. They watched what nurses did when they weren’t with patients and they discovered that nurses had to get supplies for each patient from a central storeroom. It wasn’t a quick trip and it took them away from patients, which meant nurses tended to get everything they thought they might need to avoid return trips. Once supplies are brought to a patient’s room, they must be used or thrown away. If they forgot something or needed more supplies, nurses had to return to the central storeroom. They were often interrupted on their way to and from the storeroom, which increased the risk of error.
From a process management perspective, this process is fraught with waste, from unnecessary supplies being thrown away to long trips to the storeroom to additional trips that wasted valuable nursing time. The process threatens quality of…
8Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSustaining the Culture
Sustainability has become a major issue for organizations and leaders that want to sustain the positive changes they have made through programs such as Baldrige, lean, and Six Sigma, but the truth of the matter is that they can’t. Such programs often flounder as soon as new leadership takes over or priorities change or new ownership assumes control.
I’ve written about the impact of leadership changes in “Leadership Matters Most,” citing the example of AT&T Universal Card Services, which was launched using the Baldrige model, climbed to second in the U.S. credit card industry in just 30 months, and then changed leadership and dropped to eighth over the next 30 months.
In “Keep Your Eye on Process Improvement” (HBR, August 18, 2010), Brad Power recounts the story of Allied Signal, which used Six Sigma in the 1990s to produce 31 straight quarters of earnings-per-share growth of 13% or more. Leadership changed in 2000 and 18 months later, the Six Sigma culture had essentially disappeared.
Sustainability of the positive changes associated with Baldrige, lean, and Six Sigma is not difficult if leadership and ownership don’t change, but such changes are inevitable. CEOs move on, quit, or retire. Companies merge or are acquired. So the ultimate sustainability question is: How can we keep the transformation going after those who led it are gone?
I see two ways this can happen. The first is to replace the leaders of the transformation with new leaders who fully support it. If the CEO is replaced by the COO who was personally…
23Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMaking Change Happen
This is a guest article by Arnie Weimerksirch. If you want to contribute an article to Baldrige.com, check out the guidelines here.
Change is difficult. In our personal lives we struggle to break bad habits, eat a healthier diet, or get more exercise. In spite of our good intentions, we often fail.
Organizations also find it difficult to change: Studies show that almost 85% of change initiatives fail. Even when faced with a crisis, many organizations are not able to make the changes necessary to survive. As W. Edwards Deming said, “Survival is not mandatory; it is purely optional.”
In 2004, on the 50th anniversary of the Fortune 500 list, only 71 of the original 500 remained on the list. Not all of them failed, of course, but the majority did. And they failed because they were not able to change with the times.
Why is change so difficult and what is the answer? One of the main reasons transformation initiatives fail is our love of management fads. In her book, Fad Surfing in the Boardroom, Eileen Shapiro defines fad surfing as “the practice of riding the crest of the latest management panacea and then paddling out again just in time to ride the next one; always absorbing for managers and lucrative for consultants; frequently disastrous for organizations.”
New management theories are constantly developed by “gurus” and published in prestigious journals. Recent examples include the boundaryless organization, job sculpting, reengineering, and, yes, Six Sigma. Most of these new management theories turn out to be nothing more…
8Feb2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
