All Posts Tagged With: "Six Sigma"
The Most Popular Improvement Tools
The list comes from the Global Benchmarking Network’s 2008 survey on business improvement and benchmarking. Which of these does your organization use?
- Mission and vision statement
- Customer/client surveys
- SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats)
- Informal benchmarking (encouraging employees to learn from other organizations)
- Quality management system (think ISO)
- Improvement teams
- Employee suggestion scheme
- PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act)
- Performance benchmarking (comparing process/activity performance levels)
- Knowledge management
- Business process reengineering
- Balanced scorecard
- TQM (total quality management)
- Business excellence (using Baldrige, EFQM, or other national excellence models)
- Best practice benchmarking (structured process for comparing performance and implementing best practices)
- Corporate social responsibility system
- Lean
- Industrial housekeeping (5S)
- Quality function deployment (QFD)
- Six Sigma
More than 450 responses from 44 countries ranked their organizations’ usage of these improvement tools in the order above. The percent of usage ranged from 77% for “mission and vision statement” to 22% for Six Sigma. Every tool from the top through PDCA was used by more than half the respondents; the rest were used by fewer than half.
The Baldrige message is a good news/bad news deal: “Business excellence” is currently being used by just 40% of the respondents, which is pretty good considering that only 59% said they understood what the “business excellence” tool is.
You can read a summary of the survey here.
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Hospitals Avoid Lean and Six Sigma
Healthcare has been a boon to the Baldrige Award, accounting for roughly half of all applicants over the last few years. To support their drive for performance excellence, hospitals and medical centers are also adapting lean and Six Sigma methodologies to improve quality, cycle time, and productivity.
At least, that was the impression.
In “Get Your Checkup” in the August 2009 edition of Quality Progress (you must be a member of ASQ to read the article), the ASQ Lean Six Sigma Hospital Study Advisory Committee reports on the results of an online questionnaire returned by 77 hospitals. While the small number of participants prevents sweeping conclusions, the study provides early indicators of the deployment of lean and Six Sigma in hospital settings.
According to the survey, 4.2% of hospitals have deployed lean, 8.2% have deployed Six Sigma, and 5.7% have deployed Lean Six Sigma. At the other end of the spectrum, 91.6% have zero to minor deployment of lean, 83.5% zero to minor deployment of Six Sigma, and 90% zero to minor deployment of Lean Six Sigma.
To their credit, the authors manage to build a six-page article filled with impressive tables out the experiences of a handful of hospitals, but even they eventually admit that there’s not much there:
“Based on those findings from a small sample, it would also be easy to question whether lean and Six Sigma have real, broad impact across hospitals nationwide, rather than just in isolated departments, or any ability to close the gap between good and bad metrics.”
Of course,…
10Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
