Talking with students tonight we expanded on our MBB discussions about the facilitation of change in your business.  There were a lot of great suggestions that will help anyone to improve their success at getting their change approved for Implementation!!! Work with one or two of the participants that will be in the meeting to [...]

In the development of our upcoming blended learning Black Belt course we found a great software for producing software demonstrations.  Across the e-learning business, it is the choice for nearly all participants. The software is called Captivate and it is an Adobe product.  Since it is an Adobe software, it runs a bit different from standard [...]

During a Master Black Belt class we examined a data set that involved attendance at ASQ meetings.  We were treating this data as continuous data, which was challenged.  Since the data is a count of people, it is truly an attribute count metric.  It is probability following a Poisson distribution, but I am still going [...]

I have been working with a client that is needing to model a process that generates attribute data ranging from 100% to 0%, which was not a problem but just part of their process.  Their process was targeted at 50% but different product lines were performing differently but they could not predict the output enough [...]

I am boarding a flight in Austin this morning and I see the TSA checking people and their carry-on bags at the gate. This check is clearly non-value added, since each of us and our bags were x-rayed within 1.5hrs before the flight. Why re-check us? No answer to this question is acceptable. 1. The [...]

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 [...]

This blog is intended to address issues about re-introducing Lean Six Sigma (LSS) into an organization but would also apply to the initial adoption of LSS practices into a company that has existing Black Belt-trained employees that could be involved in the LSS deployment. When an organization restarts or re-introduces a LSS program, there are [...]

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 [...]

I visited a client last week to work with their black belt candidates.  It was a great visit because their students were doing very well and I found very few conceptual errors.  Most will be getting certification within 6 months of the training.  Quite good. But one student presented a copy of a daily production [...]

Many students of Lean Six Sigma struggle with the task of determining if an extreme value is a random event or a special-cause event.  It may sound easy in class, but it is not a simple task. First of all, every data point has conditions that can be assigned as causes: A new operator was [...]