Author name: Rick Haynes

Forrest Breyfogle and I were talking yesterday about a client discussion. The client has and wants to continue with an automatic detection of a process that is out-of-control that signals the management to take actions. Neither or Forrest and I believe in automatic out-of-control actions.  Why?

Today I read an article about how my hometown, Austin Texas, has the 10th worst traffic bottleneck in the USA for a 3-5 mile stretch of the interstate through downtown. It is in a lot of news studies, but they are all derived from an article by the American Highway Users Alliance. My first thought

I was having a discussion with an organization that may soon be a partner of our Lean Six Sigma services and the question came up about how can you sell a four week Black Belt training program when others have one and two week training programs.  I think it is a key questions to a

In all of my Lean Six Sigma classes we talk about the quality of the data, and how we often find it lacking. Today I found another blog post that includes a detailed analysis of a biased data source.  It is the comparison of different movie rating groups that aggregate all of the online reviews to

I am asked the about the difference between the Black Belt and the Green Belt Lean Six Sigma (LSS) training quite often. The follow up question is typically to explain the difference in the certification projects performed by the two training levels. After 24 years in Six Sigma, I have never found a good answer

I talked with a person today that was excited to start their Lean Six Sigma learning journey.  They asked about training methods and certification methods. During the discussion, we talked about the ASQ Green Belt certification.  I guess I have been out-of-touch because I did not know the certification requirements.  NO project is required! ASQ

As an earlier blog, I wondered about the equivalencies of the Chi-Square test and the two-proportion test while I was updating our Lean Six Sigma Green Belt material. Since both are appropriate tests for comparing two proportions, they should provide an equivalent result.  Lets see.

As I was updating our Green  Belt course material to incorporate V17 screen shots I saw examples of data that could have been tested two uniquely different methods. Both conditions could exist at the end of an improvement project when you are demonstrating your improvement with a hypothesis test. These examples are quite important to

Here at Smarter Solutions we talk a great deal about the Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) Business System and how it can benefit any business.  But many people can say the same thing about other business systems, so how can we communicate the benefit of our specific system?  How about a sports analogy? Smarter Solutions resides

I am here in Toronto working and what do I find?  An article on a Canadian bank that is cited for poor statistics in the creation of a job-quality metric that shows a drastic drop which is heavily reported in the media.  An article in the Financial Post “Why CIBC’s so-called job-quality index just doesn’t