I live in fear of the day our Star Wars fanboy Black Belt learns of that, and starts calling 'em Jedi and Padawans instead of Black and Green Belts. :rolleyes:
Fortunately, SS is out of favor at my company right now, having been promoted and now identified with the previous VP. I’m expecting we’ll transition to the next, 10-year-out-of-date innovative quality program this year.
Different than “Master Black Belt”?
SS is just a tool in the toolbox, as someone said earlier in the thread. I think that the toolbox analogy is more accurate than SS intended, at least so far as our SS ‘black belts’ understand.
If you are carving a block of wood, you start with an aggressive chisel or file. As you approach a finished product, you progress to more and more fine tuned tools. SS is more of a fine tuning tool. The problem is that our SS guys use it in all cases.
There is something to be said for lean thinking (before it was absorbed by SS). First trim the excess and do the statistical analysis on what’s left. More often than not, the people on the floor have a good idea where the bottlenecks are. If they don’t, move up to the supervisors on the floor. Move up another level or two before implementing SS. It’s not cheap to complete a SS project so you might as well use it to the fullest extent, which can only be realized when the most glaring problems have been addressed. There is no point in crediting SS for making obvious changes.
The right tool for the right job.
Then there’s our SS ‘guru’ and his willful rejection of basic rules of analysis. One can’t dismiss an influencing variable without reason. This is a pit thread in the making so I’ll let it rest for now.