Posts Tagged ‘operational excellence’

10 Things to Consider When Choosing a Training Provider

Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

From time to time I am asked by a prospective student to compare The Pyzdek Institute to a competitor. Below is a typical response from me to one of these inquiries.

Dear Mr. X,
Thank you for your inquiry. Regarding a comparison of our products to those of [Competitor], I make it a policy not to comment directly on any particular competitor. However, regarding the criteria you may wish to use  when making a choice between us and any competitor, might I suggest the following:

  1. Did they write The Six Sigma Handbook? The prestige and value of your certification depends on the reputation of the service provider. If you choose The Pyzdek Institute then the author of your training will be the person who wrote the book that has been the standard textbook in the field for 13 years. His name and signature appears on your certificate. Your certification will be recognized and respected without question.
  2. Is the Certification exam included, or is it an extra charge? The fee for Pyzdek Institute training includes the certification exam.
  3. Is the certification project assessment included? The fee for Pyzdek Institute training includes this at no additional cost.
  4. Are they accredited by The International Association for Six Sigma Certification (IASSC) as a training provider? We are.
  5. Do they have provision for ongoing, low cost site access after completing the course? Our Lifetime Learning subscription provides access to our training site to students for a price that is a fraction of our full subscription price.
  6. Do they include a full one-year license to Minitab statistical software? Minitab is the defacto standard software package for Six Sigma. Our price includes a one year license and our training has numerous videos showing how to use it for performing various Six Sigma analyses.
  7. Do they include a full one-year license to Minitab’s Quality Companion project management software? We do.
  8. Is their student forum (assuming they have one) monitored by and responded to by Thomas Pyzdek, well known author and consultant with over 40 years of hands on experience in Operational Excellence?
  9. Do they offer homework assignments which are graded by Master Black Belts? We do.
  10. Do they have hundreds of self-scoring quiz questions covering the entire body of knowledge to help you learn and prepare for certification exams? We do.

These are just a few of the areas where we differ from the typical competitor. Complete details for all our courses are available in our online store. I look forward to seeing you in one of our courses soon.

Tom Pyzdek
(O) 520-204-1957
pyzdek@gmail.com

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Fox Lifetime Achievement Awards Announced

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

September 26, 2011

Continuous Process Improvement Symposiums, sponsored by California State University at Northridge, has announced that their first posthumous Lifetime Fox Award will honor quality improvement legend Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Dr. Deming’s award will be accepted by the Deming Family. It is scheduled for presentation on November 18, 2011 during the 2011 CSI symposium which runs from November 17-19.

A Fox Award for Lifetime Achievement will also be presented to Thomas Pyzdek. Considered a world authority on quality and Six Sigma, Thomas Pyzdek has written over 50 works, including such classics as The Six Sigma Handbook, The Quality Engineering Handbook, and The Handbook for Quality Management. Pyzdek’s work is widely acclaimed for its ability to make the seemingly complex subject of process excellence understandable. Pyzdek’s works have been studied by hundreds of thousands in their preparation for various certification exams. He is also a skilled trainer, hired by industry leaders worldwide to aid in their process excellence programs. Pyzdek also offers online certification and training on his website.

The CPI Symposium’s primary emphasis is to bring continuous improvement methods, including Lean, Theory of Constraints and Six Sigma, to light in an integrative, synergistic approach. It is also the occasion for the presentation of the prestigious Robert E. Fox awards. Lifetime honorees for the Fox Award are considered living role models in the field of organizational Continuous Improvement. This award recognizes those outstanding individuals whose pioneering spirit and inventiveness have improved our society and inspired others. The Fox Awards Review Board selects individuals they feel have contributed significantly to this endeavor, either with the creation, or passionate propagation, of breakthrough concepts. Past Lifetime Recipients include: Steven R. Covey, Peter Senge, Joel Barker, and others.

Click here to register for the 2011 Continuous Process Improvement symposium. Both live and Web Streaming registration is available.

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Posted in Miscellaneous, News | 1 Comment »

CBO Director Underestimates Public Sector Waste

Friday, September 16th, 2011

At a meeting of the Supercommittee Tuesday, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf cautioned that ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse would have a negligible impact on the panel’s work. “There is no evidence that suggests that this sort of effort can represent a large share of the $1.2 trillion or $1.5 trillion or the larger number that some of you have discussed as being the objective in savings for this committee,” Mr. Elmendorf said. The Washington Times story goes on to say that Vice President Joseph R. Biden is touting his efforts to find $1 billion in wasteful government spending here and there.

$1 billion dollars of waste in a federal budget that for 2012 alone is estimated to be $3.729 trillion? By my math this amount represents 0.027% of the budget. And that assumes that the Vice-President is looking at only one year’s savings. Such a pittance is hardly worth the bother.

My experience with the private sector suggests that there is in the neighborhood of 25%-40% waste in any organization which hasn’t applied Lean Six Sigma or any similar technique. This is well documented by research. The public sector certainly has at least this much room for improvement. At the low end of the estimate this represents a potential savings of $932 billion in the 2012 budget alone, or about 85% of the projected 2012 deficit. The fact that the CBO Director believes that public sector waste reduction opportunities is negligible indicates that he is completely unaware of the reality of the situation. It is unfortunate that he is spreading his ignorance to the Supercommittee charged with finding real savings. The implications for true reform and for eliminating non-value added activities rather than value-added activities are ominous.

The Operational Excellence community of professionals in the Quality, Six Sigma, Lean and Lean Six Sigma fields know from experience that the amount of waste is huge. This presents governments at all levels with the opportunity to eliminate deficits completely while not cutting value for the beneficiaries of programs. The question is, when will our political leaders begin to take this seriously? There is currently some work being pursued by the folks at Strong America Now to make this happen. Some Presidential Candidates, such as Newt Gingrich, are speaking out. The comments of Mr. Elmendorf and Mr. Biden’s efforts indicate that the current leadership has yet to understand the magnitude of the opportunity before them.

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The Lean, Six Sigma, and Quality Triad

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

In response to a message from a colleague asking about the relationship between Lean, Six Sigma and Quality, I wrote the following:

Both Lean and Six Sigma (and Lean Six Sigma, the combination of the two) are ways of improving operational excellence. Lean does this by improving flow through value streams, primarily focusing on the elimination of various forms of muda (waste.) Six Sigma does this by identifying what customers and other stakeholders want and delivering it with minimal waste, variation and errors.

The Lean and Six Sigma DMAIC disciplines focus on the processes for creating and delivering products and services that meet or exceed customer expectations. The Design for Six Sigma discipline focuses on the design of products or services that meet or exceed customer expectations. Quality is a discipline which focuses on identifying customer requirements and expectations, translating them into internal requirements, and assuring that the requirements are consistently met. Of course, these Quality activities provide input into both Lean and Six Sigma. It is the “Y” being solved for when waste is identified (Lean) or when searching for the root causes of waste, variation and errors (Six Sigma.)

Thus, Lean, Quality, and Six Sigma are all different aspects of excellence.

I welcome your comments on how you consider the three areas to be related. Or do you consider them to be unrelated ideas?

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Posted in Introduction to Six Sigma, lean-six-sigma, Quality | No Comments »

Lean Six Sigma Lives On After It Disappears

Monday, October 12th, 2009

A while ago I was asked by a colleague to recommend a Lean Six Sigma benchmark partner for a large aerospace firm that had been using Six Sigma for quite some time. Upon calling some of my favorite clients I learned that their Lean Six Sigma initiatives had been phased out. I was dismayed to hear of this and arranged to meet with one of the senior leaders to discuss why this had occurred in his organization. I learned that what had disappeared was not the Lean Six Sigma approach. Indeed, the senior leader said he knew of no other way to manage his operations. What had gone was the Lean Six Sigma bureaucracy. The personnel devoted to coaching senior leaders, providing Lean Six Sigma courses for training, etc. were gone.
It doesn’t take a lot of thought to understand why this would occur. Lean Six Sigma has been around in one form or another since 1986. That’s a pretty long run. It has evolved into a complete system for leading organizations to operational excellence. If an organization is still using Lean Six Sigma solely to execute projects, then it is missing the benefit to be had from applying the approach in its normal day-to-day operations.
If the organization has been using Lean Six Sigma for several years, it is also wasting a lot of talent by relying too much on Belts. The nature of Lean Six Sigma’s change agent infrastructure is such that the personnel involved in the program full time are routinely cycled back into the organization. These people are “damaged goods” in the sense that they can no longer function as traditional managers. Lean Six Sigma is based on principles such as root cause identification, value flow, defect prevention, etc.. Traditional management is based on command-and-control, not process; it focuses on results, not on causes. Traditional managers manage via feedback, Lean Six Sigma Leaders manage using feed-forward models.
In short, Lean Six Sigma is at its best after it has all but disappeared from the organization chart. It is still there, embedded in everything the organization is doing in its operations. It won’t go away because its practitioners realize that old-fashioned management is horribly flawed and a terrible way to run an organization. Traditional management is a disease; the Lean Six Sigma approach, done properly, is the cure.

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