Tweet Today I talked with a former student about an internal organization’s performance metrics.  They found, as I see in most organizations, a great deal of process/product level metrics but very little high level metrics.  Nearly all were about quality, with only a few about the lead time/cycle time and none about cost.  What does [...]

Tweet As I was driving today I realized why some organizations have difficulties with lean six sigma and using performance measures. I wonder if they treat their specifications like treat speed limits? You can exceed them a bit as long as you do not get caught. In this case the control charts show OOC conditions [...]

Tweet I am working with a client who is applying the Integrated Enterprise Excellence program in their organization and they struggle with a corporate belief that quality is an effort to reduce defects internally and to improve reliability after manufacturing.  Should they consider the speed as a qualtiy metric?  My belief is YES. The lean [...]

Tweet I am working with a client to help on a diagnosing a quality issue with a manufactured product.  They provided me with the typical information you might see from an organization that does not really understand field service failure analysis. I received data listing the number of units shipped each month and how many [...]

Tweet I listened to Eric Richter, a Ph.D from a government research lab, talk about red-yellow-green scorecards. He was selling the benefits of RYG scorecard. His fist points were OK. 1. They are simple to read 2. The focus intentions on a few issues Then he tried to make the creation of them difficult so [...]

Tweet It started off with a keynote by Alan Mulally of ford. He spoke of the Ford transformation. He may have read Forrest’s books because he defined the business and then measured it. They developed scorecards and then set the strategy. A great talk. He spoke for 15 minutes and then answered questions for 30+ [...]