Pyzdek Institute President and Lean Six Sigma Instructor

New online product added to existing online and live courses
Tucson, AZ March 1, 2010 – The Pyzdek Institute LLC has added Lean Six Sigma Black Belt training and certification to its portfolio of online and live courses on  Process Excellence topics. The new course is written and presented by Thomas Pyzdek, author of The Six Sigma Handbook and numerous other authoritative works. “We have been teaching Lean Six Sigma to clients in live classes for well over a decade, and we’ve been teaching Six Sigma for much longer than that,” Pyzdek said. “But the ongoing economic crisis is causing a substantial increase in customer demand for online training, which provides significant cost benefits. In response we are creating online versions of our most popular courses. Online Lean Six Sigma Black Belt training is the most recent result of this effort, and we are very excited about it.”

Online Lean Six Sigma Black Belt training consists of 69 modules covering the entire Lean Six Sigma Black Belt body of knowledge. Pyzdek stated “When I developed this training I did my best to fully integrate Lean and Six Sigma into a comprehensive approach to Process Excellence. When I teach the subject in my live seminars I emphasize that Lean and Six Sigma are complementary, and I tried to make sure that this message also came across in my online training. I believe that I succeeded.”

Among major providers of online Lean Six Sigma training, the Pyzdek Institute’s online training is the only one to utilize the popular Moodle Course Management System. Moodle allows the company to carefully monitor the progress of all students, including lesson modules viewed, resources downloaded, assignment submissions, quiz results, and so on. With Moodle, when a student says that they have successfully completed their training, they can provide documented evidence to prove it.

Moodle also lets corporate customers monitor their students as they move through training. Students can communicate with their instructors or with each other via Moodle forums, which students find are great for interacting with and learning from Master Black Belts and from each other. By using Moodle, The Pyzdek Institute can create separate “Groups” of students. Each group can be coached by its own Master Black Belt and when members of the group communicate with one another, their communications are private and can’t be seen by those who are not in the group. This allows corporate trainees to share their learning experiences with others internally, without worrying about compromising proprietary information. For example, Coventry Health Care is using The Pyzdek Institute to provide training to students in Florida and Arizona, coached by a Pyzdek Institute trained Master Black Belt employed by Coventry. Companies can even coordinate the training of employees anywhere in the world. Corporations can save substantially via group discounts.

The company’s training program is also unique in that it offers three levels of recognition, Bronze, Silver, and Gold. “We found that people have different training needs.” Said Pyzdek. “If a company will be testing and certifying their  own people, then Bronze recognition is right for them and save them money. Silver recognition adds certification testing, and Gold adds certification project presentation to a board of Master Black Belts.”

In addition, The Pyzdek Institute is the only major Lean Six Sigma training provider to offer payment plans. Every online course provides the option to pay for the training over a period of several months.

Media Contact:
Thomas Pyzdek (520) 204-1957
###

The Wharton School and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have released a special report investigating the reasons why the financial services sector is lagging in their adoption of lean tools and practices. The study finds that the attitudes are changing, albeit slowly. Apparently lower costs, fewer errors, improved efficiency and reduced cycle times appeal to bankers. Who knew?

Lean’s manufacturing origins are probably part of the problem. Non-manufacturing organizations have a difficult time making the mental adjustment between manufacturing and services terminology. I recall many years ago teaching a class where I presented a control chart of a manufacturing process. The data showed the diameters of truss rods. This was a public seminar and I had a mix of students from manufacturing, health care, insurance, services and other industries. These students were truly baffled as to how they could make this work with their businesses. Sensing the reason, I though I’d try something. I wrote the first few rows of the data table that was used for the control chart, but I didn’t put a title on the table. Then I went around the room one-by-one and asked the students some questions about their businesses. For the health care student I wrote the title on the table as “Infections per 100 Surgeries.” For the insurance student “Claims Processed per Worker per Hour.” For the service department student “Service Calls Requiring a Follow Up Visit.” As I addressed each student’s particular application, I could visibly see the light come on.

This exercise caused me to be somewhat disappointed in analysis presented by the Wharton/BCG report’s authors. Deepak Goyal, a partner in BCG’s New York office, commented “Finance is just a different kind of factory. It is a processing factory, and there’s a lot of waste.”  Another comment was “Becoming lean involves eliminating the “seven deadly sins” of waste in a process — overproduction, waiting, poor transportation/logistics, over-processing, sub-optimal inventory control, rework, and unneeded movement.” Yeah, sure. But I doubt that people in the financial sector know precisely what these guys are talking about. I suspect that a few specific financial sector examples of each type of waste would go a long way towards improving understanding. I mean, is it supposed to be obvious that sub-optimal inventory control is a problem at a bank?

Still, the report is a wealth of valuable information for those seeking to expand the reach of Lean to non-traditional areas. Those of us who are professionals in this area can glean a lot of useful guidance from the report, because we already understand Lean and Lean Six Sigma. We can add a great deal of value by translating the report into terms that our clients and employers understand so they can see exactly how these important process excellence philosophies and technologies can be applied to the processes in the financial sector.

Then, perhaps, the lines at the teller window and the waiting times for loan approvals won’t be quite so long!