Author name: Rick Haynes

Business System Quality is not the same as Manufacturing Quality! I worked for years in high-tech manufacturing where we had a very strong quality department. It managed the Quality Assurance (QA) for our outgoing product and the Quality Control (QC) for our manufacturing processes. As my career progressed, I found that many great companies do […]

A student wrote me tonight with a question that is not too common any more, since we use computers for most of our control charting. ” When should our control charts switch over to historical standard deviations vs the default estimated?” This is really a process control question that is not asked for in Lean Six

A great learning moment occurred in my last Master Black Belt class while analyzing a stable random process.  As we worked through analysis, I realized that the lesson was awesome and should be added to the course – my next task.  But for those who will not be attending our future MBB course, here it

While coaching one of our Master Black Belt students, we both came upon a somewhat unique analysis of a process change that improved an error rate across their business locations.  The learning point to take away from this posting is how a few common concepts were combined to show the business that the change was a surprisingly

Every Lean Six Sigma project should have a component of understanding the process of the customer.  In Lean Six Sigma class, you are taught how it is important to understand the customer. Many people struggle with this action.  The struggle may not be the ability to identify the customer but to understand what to ask.

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 and

I am on a contract job for Smarter Solutions to help a client introduce a Lean Six Sigma competency as part of an overall effort to introduce Business Process Management.  If you are not familiar with BPM, it is something that has been around for years but gained a name “BPM” in the past few

What should be required after taking a class in Lean Six Sigma to become certified?  A DMAIC Project?  A Capstone Project?  Are they the same? In the origins of Six Sigma, your certification was granted after completing your coursework. You may be surprised at this, but in the early Six Sigma times there was also

I was reading an article on the internet about how Google could predict a stock market drop by monitoring the search string use patterns.  As I read about the topic, it appears that the analysis was performed after the market correction and that there was information in the search strings that were used, sort of