Honeywell Recieves Accolades for its Incorporation of Six Sigma
Honeywell Electronic Materials has recieved numerous accolades for its service quality including a “Best Quality Award” from Samsung and a “Supplier Excellence Award” from Infineon. The company cites its incorporation of service quality programs into the daily business regimen for their success. Such programs include one in which Honeywell elicits and incorporates customer suggestions regarding its internal processes, an annual planning strategy which focuses on the 5-year needs of current and future customers, and finally an incorporation of Six Sigma. IndustryWeek Reports:
All employees participate in “Green Belt” classes with some earning “Black Belt” and “Master Black Belt” status.
GE Helps Airlines Stay Afloat With Six Sigma
General Electric Commercial Finance, a branch of GE, is implementing a program to help Airline companies cut costs and stay afloat. With analysts predicting first quarter losses amongst air carriers to total $2 billion, the need for extreme cost cutting is clear. GECF, which is already financing many of today’s air carriers, has a vested interest in helping these companies achieve profitability. This process has involved quite centrally, the adoption of Six Sigma strategies. In Business Las Vegas Reports:
Newlands went to Cincinnati to learn Six Sigma — a data-driven, fact-based approach that uses statistics and tools to analyze business processes. GE’s Six Sigma “black belts,” as they call them, helped America West identify potential savings.
“We used them quite a bit in the technical area,” Newlands said.
EIU Study Indicates Increased Implementation of Six Sigma for 2005
Despite almost universal recognition of the benefits of implementing Six Sigma programs, only 5 percent of all performance and quality initiatives undertaken in the past three years utilized the approach. According to a recent study conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), however, those numbers may be about to change. For the largest companies, Six Sigma is surpassed only by corporate organization realignment on CEO’s agenda for 2005. Consultant-News Reports:
“The increasing interest we are seeing in Six Sigma stems from two sources,” said Dave Antis, Executive Vice President, Celerant Consulting. “First, as Six Sigma and its track record become more widely understood, more companies are considering it. Second, as the study shows, a high percentage of other types of initiative, although apparently successful, failed to fulfill their companies’ strategic objectives.”
Human Sigma
The benefits of implementing a Six Sigma quality improvement program have been gaining recognition for years. Only recently, however, has the quality metric been extended to the human side of business. Born out of research conducted on over 80,000 managers in more than 400 companies by Gallup, the approach emphasizes the often overlooked importance of the engagement levels of employees and customers in achieving a better bottom line. The Human Sigma approach takes such knowledge about individuals in the work environment and applies it to create a more productive and consistent workforce. Express Pharma Pulse Reports:
Human Sigma is a measure that focuses on reducing variance in key employee and customer outcomes by improving an organization’s human performance and moving it towards excellence. Simply put, the human sigma approach shows how to manage – and maximise – the human difference.
Performance and Productivity Initiatives: A Tale of Four Companies
Mary Ethridge of the Beacon Journal investigates four regional companies in Northeast Ohio who are implementing a variety of efficiency and productivity initiatives to remain competitive in increasingly difficult markets. One company has hired a local business professor to investigate streamilining possibilities, another has developed its own program, while the final two have implemented the Six Sigma program. The success of the Six Sigma program is evident in a number of very tangible examples of costs savings. Akron Beacon Journal Reports:
In another case, a [Six Sigma] team noticed an unusual number of service calls on some newly installed ATM machines.
The dispensers appeared to be in working order, so the team began to hunt for a reason for the calls. They found the new ATM’s were set to generate a repair call if they didn’t spit out cash within 30 seconds. By resetting the parameters, the company saved 4,049 hours of labor.
Xerox CEO Credits Six Sigma With Company’s Turnaround
Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy spoke this week at Harvard Business School, discussing her role in the companies 180 degree turnaround. In May of 2000 the company was $18 million dollars in debt and many executives were either being accused or convicted of fraud. Despite criticism from nearly every corner, Mulcahy met with SEC regulators and initiated a redoubled effort to recoup market share by pushing R & D, productivity, and efficiency. The HARBUS Online Reports:
Mulcahy increased spending on research and development, which she called “the keys to the kingdom” and began a “relentless focus on productivity” that would include deploying Lean Six Sigma throughout the company.
GE’s Jack Welch Discusses Six Sigma Service Quality
As one of the most celebrated corporate leaders, Jack Welch’s brain has been picked for businiess strategies and solutions for years. So most expected the 2001 retiree from General Electric’s newest autoiography to reveal nothing new. Surprisingly, however, Welsh covers in depth the importance of pushing for Six Sigma quality, and creating a culture of change in the workplace. Additionally the book offers a number of the leader’s hard and fast fules. BusinessWeek Reports:
Budgets, he argues, should be less about making your numbers and living within your means than beating last year’s performance and besting competitors whom you truly understand.
Flexibility on the job is something you earn bia superior performance.
TRIZ Business Solutions Methodology
TRIZ solutions is a business solutions methodology compiled over 40 years through examinations of the world-wide patent pool. TRIZ can be applied to solving almost any technological application by clarifying the problem from the large systems level, all the way down to the parameter level. Because of this unique capability, TRIZ is a standard part of the Design in the Six Sigma Process. Ferret.com Reports:
Some further aspects of TRIZ thinking are:
Every product, process or technology follows predictable trends of evolution. Situational awareness of position on this trend is critical to strategy and planning.
The concept of ideality is found throughout TRIZ, being gain over pain, or the quest for increased value obtained at ever decresing costs. Over time every system evolves towards increasing ideality.