Yep. And if a company is going down the tubes it will help smokescreen the Street from calling for a new board and leadership.
Another Six Sigma Green Belt here. DMAIC and DFSS (Design for Six Sigma).
I think Six Sigma training for engineers is useful. It’s good to put some hard numbers and principles to some of these concepts, and to get people to think in rational, logically connected ways about quality. The company I work for is a leader in Six Sigma, and everyone in the company in a technicacl capacity (engineering, IT) has to be Six Sigma trained.
That said, we’re also pretty flexible about how we apply it. We tend to latch on to the things that have applicability to what we’re doing, and dump the stuff that doesn’t. And rather than follow some of the laborious steps for formal FMEAs, Houses of Quality, etc. yada yada, we’ve come up with some “80% solutions” that are much more streamlined but embody the same principles.
Basically, I think Six Sigma training is useful in the same way that Calculus is for most engineers. Most engineers never have to figure out a complex integral or derivative after they get out of school, but the process of learning calculus gives you a better intuitive understanding of how the world works. Six Sigma is the same. After you’ve gone through the training you develop a better understanding of the issues.
So then you don’t have to draw up a fishbone diagram for every problem that you encounter? 
Nope. And our houses of quality are really just shacks.
Bows deeply, you are my hero!
Other than the fervent believers (GE), I didn’t think anyone considered six sigma to be en vogue anymore. Once it makes it into the college textbooks, doesn’t that mean it’s run its course? I heard a quote about six sigma (don’t remember where), where someone said six sigma was the equivalent of stopping your heart for 10 minutes a year.
Hehe, you make a valid point – absolutey valid – but that’s not what I meant. Also considering that we do all of our own Six Sigma in house, we don’t have any consultants’ egos to stroke. I am saying, though that if you’re true to the method, you can’t fail. And I’ll stress that if you use other methods and stay true, too, you can’t fail. There’s nothing magical about Six Sigma (consultants will tell you there is.
In the base form, it’s simply a standard for accomplishing something. It lets multiple elements of an entire corporation be able to “speak the same language.” It would be distatrous in my industry, for example, if one team standardized on the metric system, the other standardized on Imperial measures, and the other standardized on fractional parts of a single unit defined as the length of Bob-the-boss’s penis.
The firm I used to work for put me through training as 6 sigma deployment champion. It was training being offered by our primary client to their vendors. My role was then to roll out the program, but only to the region of offices that serviced this client. It was all a sham (not the program, but my employer’s vision). Their only interest in the program was so they could tell our client they were using the processes. Main problem was that my employer was an international firm and my team had absolutely no control over any of our internal processes nor did we have the power to make changes on a regional basis. Like I said, it was all a sham. They “invested” well over $40K in training with no intention in changing anything, just wanted to be able to claim the 6 sigma label.
And that’s the point that we are both driving toward. I agree with you that the statistical tools and methods of six sigma are beneficial. Its the political crap that gets wrapped into the method that fails us.
Unfortunately my experience, which happens to be the experince of others in this thread, is that the six sigma “professional consultants” are blowing smoke up our ass promising a cure-all for everything. And our leadership group is singing the same chorus though its obvious that they are using this program as a a way of blowing smoke up wallstreet’s ass.
I’m bitter over the experience mainly because there are big problems that need fixing in my division but the six sigma effort is actually interfering with the progress my team would make if we were left to our own;and to top it off, any positive results from non sigma work are quickly “adopted” by six sigma teams and posed as “proof of the method”.
But what’s so bad about standardizing using the Bob-the-Boss method? 
Reporting…
So…you’re saying consulting helps? 
In this instance, it’s getting the rate of zombification up to six sigma, which is a problem as the current zombies keep eating the brains of the living, thus inhibiting the efficiency of the plague.
(Psst, this is a 2005 thread)
Maybe we can benefit from this zombie.
Anyone in industry care to comment on the current status of six sigma? What is the current “flavor of the month”?
One of my old colleagues referred to it as “Six Sigmoid”.
I visit a large company near me that stores and distribute car parts. Ten years or so ago ther fully embraced the 6sigma idea. I used to look at the complicated charts on the wall and someone once tried to explain it all to me.
When I was there just before Christmas, I saw the chars and went to have a look. They stopped around 5 years ago. They did look good though…
I remember going in to see my boss, way back in the 80’s. He was the Sales director and I was briefing him for a meeting with an important client. Of his wall were some impressive looking charts, all with an upward slope and I asked him about something on one. He laughed and told me that they were window dressing and he had bought them from a magazine.
We still use it. Large, global, automotive company that you’ve certainly heard of. It works for us. Mostly. Yeah, all of the “greenbelt” stuff is fluff to keep the appearances up, but real, meaningful blackbelt projects truly do make positive contributions to the business.
I don’t know if it’s the latest and greatest, but I still see a lot of “Lean Six Sigma” going around. Trying to shoehorn Lean Manufacturing (driving out waste) and Six Sigma (classical SPC in new clothes) into one five-pound bag.
I used to work for a GE company - who had Six Sigma everywhere. Where they built aircraft engines, electrical components or medical care components I can see the merit is understanding and reducing your source of failures. I would guess aero engines may be built to 10 or 12 sigma…
We were an insurance company called GE Insurance Solutions. We were going to be called GE Risk Solutions but Jack Welch flew into a rage and told everyone that he had spent a decade convincing Wall Street that he had engineered risk out of the GE Group via Six Sigma (amongst other moonshine no doubt) and no GE company was going to have Risk in its name as long as he was around.
I was a risk manager for them. Told I had to start doing my Green Belt immediately. My life was a misery. Fortunately they realized they didn’t have a clue about insurance (“Losses? We have losses? Why can’t we six sigma them out of our portfolio?” was one question I got) and sold us to Swiss Re after only eighteen months after I got there. Six Sigma was instantly killed - everyone burst out singing (to paraphrase that poet whose name I forget).
Six Sigma is largely horseshit.
Actually, the rule of thumb where I used to work, was a management fad was passed when it showed up in Dilbert… which was also the time it showed up in our company.
One management consultant (who was pushing statistical process control, pre-6Sig) described these management fads as BOHICA - “Bend Over, Here It Comes Again”.
It’s never too late to poke fun at management fads.
The fad where I work is to be “Lean” to achieve “Kaizen”.
Because using the Japanese translation of something is fancy. :rolleyes:
(Says the guy whose username is a Japanese variant of his real name.)