We see some company responses to economic downturn are to eliminate staff as if that were the only way to become a viable company once again. We wonder if these companies have some cost improvement methodology behind them that would give their management other options than summarily removal of personnel.
Survival of the fittest is not just a biological concern. Our business must constantly adapt to external stimuli and find better, quicker ways of performing our work. One way to accomplish this growth is through actions sometimes referred to as project post mortem, or an after action report. We have a plethora of tools of […]
Like the Ishikawa Diagram, the Histogram can serve us well. The histogram allows us to visualize the trends based upon a category. It is a graphical distribution of data, in the example below we see the distribution of the duration to prepare an incoming vehicle to be a suitable device to put under test out […]
We have recently had a discussion on what it takes to quality assure software. The discussion focused on FMEA and the role it plays in quality assurance. The discussion began to sound as if the FMEA was the panacea for poor quality. There is no silver bullet. To be sure the FMEA (which is essentially […]
A cost reduction as we have already defined it in a previous blog results in an improvement against budget. A plethora of cost reductions can result in a significant reduction in overhead, which is increases the margin of every product in the building. Cost reductions immediately affect the bottom line. Cost reduction work has the […]
When working for a company that takes cost reductions seriously, we can expect to see some categories repeated. Let’s take a look at these and what they are: Cost reduction: we spend less on a line item than our budget Cost avoidance: we choose to spend and then decide not to (often occurs with capital […]
Teams must grow; teams cannot be simply appointed and anointed. We may have a designated group that evolves into a team, but this emergent phenomenon takes time. It takes time to discover the strengths and weakness if each member of the group, understanding that ultimately transforms into trust, the backbone value/concept for any successful team. […]
Many raindrops make an ocean. We have seen a divisional vice-president sneer at a small cost reduction and tell us it was not Six Sigma material. We didn’t care, because permitting small cost reductions makes the practice part of the culture while still adding benefits to the firm. We have already shown in another blog […]
The Pareto chart (not to be directly confused with the Pareto probability distribution function) is a simple approach to revealing significance in data. Before we plot our chart, we need to complete some initial work: Gather the data in a natural format (count, floating point [decimal], dollars, etc.) Sort the data from high to low […]
The real kaizen is all about the 10,000 things. Maasaki Imai’s description of relentless, creeping quality improvement is apt. It also fits with the comprehensive philosophy of total quality management (TQM). We say “real” kaizen because we have so-called kaizen events that have nothing to do with inexorable cultural change and a whole to do […]