Hang on to your integrity

As you read this you will, no doubt, have already made (and perhaps broken) your New Year’s resolutions. I’d like to propose one that we, as business leaders, have a special responsibility to follow and whose failure we hear about in the news almost every day.

• business
• ethics

Have your cake and eat it too

What purpose, if any, does Six Sigma serve in economic downturns? Full disclosure: I teach and consult in Six Sigma and related areas, and you’re reading this article because you’re interested in Six Sigma, so we may not be the most objective people to assess this, but in this article, I will do my best to find the truth.

• six sigma
• layoffs
• policy deployment
• daily management

More on Acceptance Sampling

By the time you read this, the amazingly long U.S. presidential election will be over. All U.S. citizens will be wandering around aimlessly bumping into objects, pressing their hands to the sides of their heads as the indignation poisons slowly leave their bodies, leaving them with a hangover-like malaise and an intermittent need to babble a mishmash of campaign slogans. So, to cheer you up, I present you with the rest of the story I began last month about acceptance sampling.

• aql
• mil-std-105
• ansi z1.4
• acceptance sampling

Fix your business, that is

Every once in a while, people ask about acceptance sampling plans and I get all riled up. We all know (especially in this political season) that humans are addicted to their indignation high, so here’s your fix for today.

• aql
• mil-std-105
• ansi z1.4
• acceptance sampling

What your complaints process never told you

In the Six Sigma world, we give a lot of lip service to the importance of the customer; we even have an official name for it—voice of the customer, or VOC. The problem is that many businesses don’t really have a good system for giving the customer what they ask for, much less one for listening to what they say. If you have been into a retail store recently, you may wonder if anyone has a good system for that. So what should a good customer quality assurance (CQA) system look like?

• customer
• customer quality assurance
• voice of the customer

And Make Black Belts Obsolete?

I read an article in Wired magazine the other day that got me to thinking about the relationship between statistics, engineering knowledge, and theory. The article claimed that with the era of massive data storage and analytical capabilities, the scientific concept of the “theory” was becoming obsolete. What implications does this have for people working with data to solve problems? Can we find solutions without a theory? Will Google obsolete the Black Belt?

• scientific method
• six sigma
• dmaic
• problem solving
• google