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When I was a young, poor college student, I bought a chair at a garage sale. I wasn’t looking for a chair, but this vinyl tufted recliner just called out to me. Since its precarious trip home from that garage sale – upside down on a blanket on the roof of my rusted-out green AMC Hornet – that chair has remained one of the most comfortable chairs I’ve ever sat in.
Recently, I noticed that the years had taken its toll on my old friend: the vinyl was cracked and split with age, the wood was dinged up and faded, and it was in general need of some TLC.
Continue Reading "Boxes, Whiskers and Recliners"
Posted by Jay Arthur in QI Macros Monthly Newsletters.
ASQ Membership is mainly manufacturing which is only 13% of US employment. How can we start helping the underserved?
Download my “Agile Process Innovation” E-Book
“I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“I was looking at one of ASQ’s media kit things and I was kind of surprised (but not really) when I looked at it and noticed that about 80 percent of the membership is manufacturing but only 13 percent was healthcare or other service-related things.
“The funny thing about that is that’s not how America is employed, right? 80% of America works in service industries and only 13 percent work in manufacturing.
Continue Reading "ASQ Is Missing Out on a Huge Market for Quality"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Agile Lean Six Sigma, Improvement Insights, Lean, Manufacturing, Six Sigma.
Six Sigma students are often confused by terminology. Variable and attribute data are often confusing. Calling it measured or counted doesn’t help that much. Here’s a way to explain it that almost everyone can understand quickly.
“Early on when I was teaching Quality Improvement, people kind of struggled with the whole idea of variable and attribute data, and telling them that it was measured and counted didn’t seem to help a lot.
“As a programmer, the way I think about it is: If it has a decimal point, it has to be measured, right? If it’s an integer, it’s most likely counted, right?
Continue Reading "An Easy Way to Tell if Data is Variable or Attribute"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, QI Macros, Statistics.
Do you spend too much time chasing why one number is too high or another is too low? Are these kinds of wild goose chases wasting time while the real problems go wanting? The XmR chart is the answer to your dreams.
“Dr. Donald Wheeler calls the XmR chart (or Individuals and Moving Range chart) “the Swiss Army knife of control charts.” You can use it for all kinds of things.
“I believe if every company in America started using XmR charts to track all of their key process indicators, I don’t care if it’s financial results or defects or patient length of stay or I don’t care what it is.
Continue Reading "Start Using XmR Charts for All of Your KPIs"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, QI Macros, Statistics.
Thanks for attending the 2021 Lean Six Sigma World Conference. Click below to see a quick demo of how QI Macros can help you prevent waste, rework and lost profit.
Continue Reading "QI Macros Software Demo – 2021 Lean Six Sigma World Conference"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Lean, Manufacturing, QI Macros, Six Sigma.
Over 50 people signed up for this webinar, with Jay Arthur demonstrating some of the software’s most frequently used tools and answering questions asked by attendees. Some attendees were familiar with the software and already use it, some had only begun to use it; all were interested in learning new ways that QI Macros can help them with their Agile Lean Six Sigma and Quality Improvement efforts. (You can hear him answering questions and comments typed in by webinar attendees.)
If you saw a feature demonstrated in the webinar that might have been added to QI Macros after the version you’re using (for instance, the Improvement Project Wizard, the Fixed Limit indicator or the automated Process Change Wizard), you may need to purchase an upgrade to bring your QI Macros to the current version.
Continue Reading "2/9/21 QI Macros webinar"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Data Mining, Excel, QI Macros, Webinar.
Here’s the craziest Lean Pull System explanation I’ve ever seen, but it stuck with me:
“A long time ago I was introduced to Lean. We asked the consultants that were helping us with it, “What’s Lean, and what’s a Pull System” and they surprised us all because they started undoing their belts like this.
“They pulled [the belts] out and they said, “If you have a system and you try and push product through it, guess what? You get slack in the middle.” Does this make sense? You get all this work in process and everything else piling up. If you make one end faster the other ends aren’t keeping up.
Continue Reading "Belting Out A Lean Pull System"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights.
Even though I haven’t been driving my car much lately, I know better than to ignore regular maintenance. Since it had been quite a while since my last oil change, I called a small local shop I know and booked an appointment.
When the time came, I drove in and was greeted in the parking lot by the owner, Greg. I started taking my cars to Greg when he first opened his first shop and have been a regular customer ever since. In addition to Greg’s warm, friendly and easygoing attitude, he knew more about fixing cars than anyone I’d ever met.
Continue Reading "Histograms and… tire stacks?"
Posted by Jay Arthur in QI Macros Monthly Newsletters.
My childhood doctor did it all. Now I almost never see a doctor. Are You Doing Black or Green Belt work, or “No Belt” work?
“When I was growing up as a kid, our family doctor, Dr. Pierce (and what an unfortunate name)… anyway, Dr. Pierce was actually a MASH 4077 kind of a doctor, right? He was he was in Korea [where] they were doing meatball surgery. But back in the 50s, he’d come in and take your temperature, check your pulse, and he would give you the shots and anything else that was there: write the prescriptions out long hand and rip them off a pad and hand them to you.
Continue Reading "Are You Doing Black Belt Work or No Belt Work?"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Jay Arthur Blog.
Mom used to sew all of her own clothes, just like many people in Six Sigma are creating their own chart templates or code. Mom figured out a better way. You can too.
“Growing up in the 50s, my mom made all of her own clothes. She would go to the fabric store and pick out fabrics and pick out patterns. She’d come home and on this big cardboard thing she’d lay out the pattern on the thing and cut out all the pieces. Then she’d have bought thread, and then she’d sit there at the sewing machine and she would sew blouses and skirts and dresses.
Continue Reading "Are You Sewing Your Own Six Sigma Toolkit?"
Posted by Jay Arthur in Improvement Insights, Lean, Six Sigma.
