Six Sigma Archives | Page 10 of 11

Repetitions versus Replications

By Ron Pereira - May 8th, 2007

Many Lean & Six Sigma practitioners struggle to differentiate between a repetition and replication. Normally this confusion arises when dealing with Design of Experiments (DOE). Let’s use an example to explain the difference. Pai

Outsourcing versus Offshoring

By Ron Pereira - May 6th, 2007

It seems like every time I turn around there is a new survey. One says Lean rocks, one says almost everyone that tries Lean fails, and one says Dilbert ruined Six Sigma. OK, this last one is stretching it a bit. Maybe. Well just today

Saudi Arabia meets Six Sigma

By Ron Pereira - May 5th, 2007

A series of ‘Six Sigma Foundation Courses’ are going to take place during May 2007 in different cities of Saudi Arabia. Link to article.

Dumbing Down Six Sigma

By Ron Pereira - April 30th, 2007

I recently came across an interesting article written by Mark Kiemele, co-founder and president of Air Academy Associates. In the article Mr. Kiemele discusses how Six Sigma could die a slow death or remain around for many years to com

Bad Management

By Ron Pereira - April 27th, 2007

After submitting my post last night I wondered if my overly optimistic attitude was unrealistic. Only one person has commented on the post and this person seemed to think I was off my rocker a bit. I also got to thinking of the recent

Complainers Wear Me Out

By Ron Pereira - April 26th, 2007

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people constantly complain about how management or some authoritative body (i.e. government official, church leader, etc.) is doing them wrong. These people, you likely know a few, usually complain

Graphs 101 – By Seth Godin

By Ron Pereira - April 25th, 2007

My good friend Seth Godin, OK so he doesn’t know I exist but I digress, recently took note of his Google History data. He said the data shows he does a lot more searching on Tuesday. He went on to say that this was completely coi

Narrowing the list with n/3

By Ron Pereira - April 25th, 2007

Rob over at 63 Buckets recently had an excellent post where he discussed the nominal group technique. This brought to mind a neat trick that can be used to help a team take a large list of ideas and scope them down into a more manageab

Binary Logistic Regression

By Ron Pereira - April 21st, 2007

Yikes… this title sounds serious, eh? No worries… we can get though it. We use linear regression when we have variable Y data (output) and variable X data (input) and we want to know if there is correlation between them. We

Taguchi Index – Cpm

By Ron Pereira - April 16th, 2007

Last night we discussed the Taguchi Loss Function and how Taguchi methods are more concerned with hitting the target compared to more traditional methods that often focus on keeping our data between the upper and lower specification li

Taguchi Loss Function

By Ron Pereira - April 15th, 2007

Saying the words “Genichi Taguchi” to a hard core “western statistician” may get you some dirty looks. Actually, some of these crazy statisticians may want to strike you for saying this person’s name. Why the hate you

Span – GE’s Variation Weapon

By Ron Pereira - April 12th, 2007

GE is arguably one of the best examples of Six Sigma excellence today. An often heard phrase is, “Motorola invented Six Sigma and GE perfected it.”A slick “variation weapon” GE has developed is called Span. I have never worked

The Airline Companies Amaze Me

By Ron Pereira - April 8th, 2007

In Lean and Six Sigma we speak about the importance of understanding value from the perspective of the customer. If you miss this all the Kanban and Control Charts in the world won’t help you. Most of the airline companies in

How to Achieve Zero Defects

By Ron Pereira - April 3rd, 2007

A few days ago my friend Jon Miller posted an interesting blog where the discussion was how to achieve zero defects. A few of my favorite bloggers, John Hunter and Pete Abilla, posted comments to Jon’s blog so I will not repeat what

Textron Six Sigma

By Ron Pereira - March 30th, 2007

I recently came across this article written about the Six Sigma program at Textron. In the article Bob Zimering, a Textron Master Black Belt, discusses Six Sigma at Textron and responds to some of its critics. When discussing th

Explaining Cp and Cpk

By Ron Pereira - March 26th, 2007

When we speak about the capability of processes we often refer to a couple indices called Cp and Cpk. These two indices, used together, can tell us how capable our process is and whether or not we have a centering issue. For the math

The Cat is Back!

By Ron Pereira - March 25th, 2007

The Cat is back! My blogging pal KT Cat, over at The Scratching Post, has thrown out another hot sports opinion related to his (or her) negative experience with Lean Six Sigma. I must admit I like to read this feline’s stuff a

Dials for adjusting pressure, speed, and temperature

Demystifying Design of Experiments

By Ron Pereira - March 19th, 2007

I love Design of Experiments (DOE). Over the years, I have done my fair share of them – everything from simple 2^2 full factorial designs to your more complicated Response Surface Methodology designs. In this article, I want to start

Introducing SPACER

By Ron Pereira - March 18th, 2007

Tonight I want to introduce one of the best tools available to ensure you have a good meeting or training class. The technique I am referring to is called SPACER. It stands for: Safety Purpose Agenda Conduct Expectations Roles It sound

Six Sigma City Magazine – Free

By Ron Pereira - March 10th, 2007

I just came across a pretty slick online magazine. Follow this link and gain access to the new online Six Sigma City Magazine. It’s free (for now at least). Until next time, I wish you all the best on your journey towards continu

Regression – Part 3

By Ron Pereira - March 6th, 2007

This evening we will wrap up our discussion of regression. So far we have discussed what regression is and a few ways to determine whether our model is significant. Next up I want to discuss something called the least squares me

Regression – Part 2

By Ron Pereira - March 5th, 2007

Last night we began our discussion on regression. Tonight, I want to talk about a few more things related to this topic. As I was thinking of what to write I realized how difficult it is to explain these topics without a flip ch

Regression – Part 1

By Ron Pereira - March 4th, 2007

After posting my recent blog on hypothesis testing I received a request to write about regression in a similar manner. As I am always focused on the “voice of the customer” I will take on regression tonight. This will b

Teaching our Kids

By Ron Pereira - March 1st, 2007

I am of the opinion that the US education system needs some major work. Today, in our public school system we push students through with little regard to what their strengths, weaknesses, likes, and dislikes are. I once heard (from som

Hypothesis Testing

By Ron Pereira - February 27th, 2007

One of my favorite statistical tools is hypothesis testing. We can use hypothesis testing for many purposes. For example, we would use the popular 2-sample t-test when we have two samples of variable data and want to understand if they

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