For process manufacturing companies, it is a constant challenge to meet their customer’s product quality specifications, while operating as lean as possible. 

Discovering the underlying factors that influence compliance, product quality, production efficiency and your performance as a supplier requires greater accuracy and precision than many manufacturing metrics provide.

To be Lean, in process improvement speak, is to maximize customer value by eliminating waste. This means that an organization can create more value for customers with fewer resources if they can understand customer value and focus key processes to continually improve.

Many quality professionals, including statisticians, have remained mired in their rapidly diminishing consultative roles of teaching statistical tools, analyzing data, designing experiments and performing internal consulting duties while having few leadership responsibilities and limited accountability.

Six Sigma is still one of the most popular methodologies in use today. As proof all one has to do is read the periodicals and textbooks or attend an ASQ section meeting or conference.

When challenged to improve efficiency, increase safety, and save money, Boston Scientific Heredia’s Amplatz Super Stiff Guidewires area team chose a DMAIC roadmap to reach its goal.

Not surprisingly, the definition of simplification is pretty simple—to make less complex or complicated; to make easier; or to reduce to fundamental parts.

With the attention Six Sigma has been receiving, I thought it might be interesting to offer my perspective as someone who worked from the inside of a large organization to launch a major Six Sigma initiative.

 Previous blogs described a business management system and how projects can be selected that benefits the enterprise as a whole. This blog is a second in a series which steps through various aspects of the Lean Six Sigma Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) roadmap for process improvement.