Posted on 11/01/2002 7:43:37 PM PST by VaBthang4
Edited on 04/13/2004 1:40:04 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
At a time when fighting the war on terrorism has become arguably the most important issue facing the USA, authorities are looking into an unlikely weapon to aid their fight: Six Sigma.
Six Sigma is nothing like a laser-guided smart bomb but rather a statistics-heavy regimen of analyzing problems that has saved corporations billions.
(Excerpt) Read more at usatoday.com ...
How cute. Lets fight terrorism with software.
Don't misunderstand - I work in the IT field and am familiar with 6S (at least thats how the nipple heads refer to it.) I do not use it directly - I know what it does.
No, the first steps in this war need to be border closings, large amounts of HE delivered in 500 - 1000 - 2000 lb. packages, etc.
This software may have it's place - possibly from the outset, certainly as a follow on.
Right now, this country needs to be 99.99% accurate in taking out the fanatic's - on their ground. Blow them up - on their turf.
Like my man, Gen. Patton was fond of saying, "Don't waste time doing Power Point presentations - make the enemy do Power Point presentations..." - or something to that effect.
To think that 6S is the answer is silly. A tool, yes. After the hardware has spoken. After the ground has been taken. After dictators have been removed.
LVM
Willie Green = BS Industrial Engineering + MBA (Operations Management)
I can assure you at a professional level that I understand the techniques inside and out.
Furthermore, I fully believe in the benefits obtained by properly applying the techniques, (as I said in my previous post).
My caveat is for those situations where it is heavy handedly IMPROPERLY instituted.
"Training" provided to otherwise incompetent "experts" who don't know their butt from a hole in the ground, but have been empowered with all the current buzzwords to everybody elses' fear and confusion.
It is a horiffic nightmare, a malicious plague.
Well as you stated, you work for GE Financial Assurance.
I am certain that is an important corporate function,
and likely more complex than others may envision.
Yet, it would be my impression that the processes, methods, procedures being addressed (complex as they may be) are primarily of the "paper pushing variety".
Please correct me if my assumption is wrong, but I say that in contrast to attempting to implement the same techniques on the manufacturing shop floor where attempting to achieve a statistical quality level of less than 3.4 ppm can be horrificly expensive in terms of tooling and capital equipment improvements, depending on the nature of the component being manufactured, design tolerances, etc. etc. etc.
To an extent, it can be the same horrible internal political game that is played with hitting certain budgetary goals that "the boss" focuses on. When the emphasis is on Six-Sigma, all the wheels start cranking to show as much six-sigma "success" in the reports, whether the actual activities necessary to achieve them make sense or not. What's the old addage? "Figures lie & liars figure"???
Rent the movie GATTACA and observe life driven by Six Sigman concepts... where every decision, every resource, every person is totally rationalized. Experimentation, surprise and innovation are squashed out.
How can someone know in advance what info is important? 6 Sigma works for manufacturing or highly regularized paper processes such as approving cookie cutter loans at GE Capital.
However can a 6 Sigma genius tell me if this information vital or not?--- 'A field agents observes there seem to be many Arabs at flight schools.' Well most Arab countries train their future pilots in the US. There have always been Arabs at flight schools. Can 6 Sigma tell me at what point does that info constitue a clue for further investigation or when should it get ignored?
A flash back. Yes its always the lego kits or another one is putting the beans in the bowl thing.
The solution to that problem is easy- work smarter not harder, multitask, do parallel processing.
Huh, TQM graduate I see. I was a double graduate of TQM training too, it was pretty nearly the same thing as Six Sigma. Some of the engineers put yellow stickies on their door, that read TQM graduate. As a TQM evaluator it used up about 1/3 of my useful working day and 99.6% of the suggestions for improvement were nonsense.
You are not mistaken, but more specifically it is German. Many of the ISO specifications are plagarized word for word from German DIN specs. The two standards are largely interchangble as far as content is concerned. Psssssss...don't tell this to an ISO consultant he may pretend to be offended.
Sounds like a technocrat's wet dream to me.
We have our own process improvement system at my company - it's called "three strikes and you gotta go work at GE" - works great!
The first buzzword of this nature that I recall was "Zero Defects" back in the 70s. You are correct. All of these faddish management approaches seem to last a few years and then fade into obscurity. In the end the defining characteristics of any organization are leadership and training. If you have strong leaders and good trainers you can whip any problem that exists or arises.
That's not to say that there isn't merit to 6 sigma. But the GE approach is as much about error reduction and improvement as it is in selling 6 sigma as a product offering. But frankly, if my key customer would approve a competitors product offering (and that's in the process) I would be telling GE goodbye.
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