All 2 entries tagged Pius

Six Sigma for business transformation

Follow-up to Six Sigma and Profound Knowledge from Kang's blog

The presentation we had in PIUS was quite interesting. Most groups (except for Amanda,Ahbi,Smiley's group) end up coming to similar conclusions, that is

Six Sigma is somewhat lacking the psychological aspects of business management

Although it has a set of strong process improvement tools, it's relative weak emphasis on "people" issues such as acceptance, commitment to six sigma, making the changes 'stick', overcome complacency, granting exceptions means that it will likely encounter problems before the implementation begins. Preparing the people for this change is therefore crucial to Six Sigma success. And this will be the central topic in tomorrow's presentation.

The second important conclusion which we didn't quite capture in our presentation is that

Six Sigma, as a process tool improves business effciencies yet it is weak on providing effective solutions

Graeme gave the example of floppy disk, CD-ROM. A more touching example for my digital savvy classmates would be "Why continue making ever better CD-Players if you've got an IPOD?". The constantly changing environment such as digital business industry highlights the weakness of six sigma as a total improvement solution.

: 22 Jan 2009 22:48 |  Tags: Mbe Pius |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Six Sigma and Profound Knowledge

In the past couple days I have been researching Six Sigma in relation to Deming's system of Profound Knowledge (SoPK). Initially, this was a difficult task because I was not familiar with the Six Sigma methodologies. And for SoPK, although we have studied it before during CBE, I never looked at it from from the angle of process improvement. So quite naturally, I focused on the technical but obvious features shared between the two including

1. Variation as Normal Distribution versus Variation on a control chart
2. PDCA versus DMAIC- comparable or quite different?
3. Variation as common/special cause versus Defect per Million Opportunities (DPMO)
4. Continous improvement versus Conformance to specification
5. Even tried to understand the drifting of the distribution and the whole Taguchi loss function, 1.5 sigma drift etc .. but it just lost me...

Even though this has all been rather confusing at first, I did manage to get a better idea of what exactly six sigma is and try to achieve. This has helped me tremendously with PIUS mini project one. I was able to distinguish between the technical (project) level relationships from theorectical (conceptual) level relationships much better.

I resist from the temptation to draw any conclusions prematurely. This will best be left for the presentation tomorrow. I will look forward to it.

: 21 Jan 2009 22:22 |  Tags: Mbe Pius |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem