Written by Rick Haynes on May 3, 2012 – 7:54 pm
I promised a few Master Black Belts to provide information of writing Macros in Minitab. They have described a real labor intensive effort to produce scorecards using Excel macros. I do understand the issues. You can do a lot with Minitab Macros. First, there is a help function just for macro functions. Now that Minitab [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on March 27, 2012 – 8:53 am
The Wall Street Journal had an article this weekend titled “When Risk is a Red-Meat Issue” by Carl Bialik on March 23, 2012. This may be behind the WSJ pay wall, but if you can read it, please do. The article starts with a study that concluded that eating one serving of red meat per [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on March 20, 2012 – 4:17 pm
Smarter Solutions receives many calls from prospective clients that want Lean Six Sigma (LSS) training, which we provide, but they generally only want the training with no other support. It is usually a money issue, where the company is trying to spend the minimum amount. Good training is expensive, but what truly costs more? Wasting [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on January 31, 2012 – 11:36 am
In a coaching session with a Green Belt (GB) student I was shown a case where there is no need to baseline the process. Their process was experiencing 100% defectives for an entire year. Now, it was not a manufacturing process so the interpretation of defective did not mean that the product was scrapped. In [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on January 24, 2012 – 4:31 pm
A past student talked to me about a request from their boss to generate a project list for the year for the department. In this case it is an IT department with a number of trained belts in a large multinational. The past student has been working as a senior technologist and MBB for only [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on January 16, 2012 – 8:04 pm
A student in this week’s class shared his project progress. As many students find, the problem statement had changed during the project due to a better understanding of the issues. An expectation that a problem statement is perfect at the start of an effort is unreasonable. Most LSS projects are initiated by business leaders because [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on December 27, 2011 – 5:19 pm
As I traveled for the Christmas Holiday this year I was in Seattle, near where I grew up. It is a long ways from Texas where I currently live. All of the people I saw were living their lives with very little conception of the world outside of their hometown, possibly just what can be [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on December 15, 2011 – 6:02 pm
Jon Hansen, a past client and consultant to our company posted a blog on SEO efforts, stating that they do not work. It can be found at his blog with a title of Actual examples demonstrating why SEO is more hype than substance. I wrote my blog to show that our experience follows his. Like [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on October 22, 2011 – 10:03 am
A student asked me about the expected workload of a black belt. They wondered what they should expect when their Lean Six Sigma program gets up and running. Here is my response. The typical answer to this question applies to a full time BB/GB/MBB In this case, the planning estimate is that you should plan [...]
Written by Rick Haynes on October 5, 2011 – 10:19 am
I am working with a client that is trying to develop an evaluation system for its teachers. The goal is to use student test scores as part of the teacher evaluation. The concept is valid, of course, but how do you weight that input as a measure of the teacher skill? Schools are a unique [...]