Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a method for generating a large number of ideas in a short period of time. Brainstorming should be full of energy, moves along rapidly, and is synergistic in …
Brainstorming is a method for generating a large number of ideas in a short period of time. Brainstorming should be full of energy, moves along rapidly, and is synergistic in …
A business case is one of the major components of the project charter. The other two major components include the problem statement and the project scope. The business case describes, …
The Black Belt is generally a full-time process improvement position within an organization. It might be full time, but it many times is a temporary position – perhaps a two-year …
Business Process Management (BPM) is more of a holistic management approach (as compared to Six Sigma) focusing on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of …
The capability ratio is the inverse of the Cp index. Remember that the Cp index is the specification spread divided by the process spread of six standard deviations. Flip that formula around and you would be dividing the process spread by the specification spread. In the case of a capability ratio, you would be looking for a smaller-is-better characteristic. With the Cp index, you are looking for a larger-is-better characteristic.
As mentioned in the course, there are two ways to make a bad part, or to make for an unhappy customer experience when dealing with continuous data. Either the process variation centering is off, or the dispersion (fatness, or slop in the process) is too wide. A capability study will tell you with two numbers represented by either Cp Cpk, or Pp Ppk whether your process is capable of meeting customer requirements in either the short term or the longer-term.
A cause/effect diagram was first known by the name fishbone diagram because it looks like the skeleton of a fish. It was first made popular by Dr. Ishikawa back in the late 1970s and early 80s. Usually the cause/effect diagram is drawn on a large whiteboard or a large flipchart. The effect is usually written at the 3 o’clock position. A horizontal line divides the whiteboard into two equal parts.
A project charter is a document that contains the basic elements (i.e., business case, problem statement, and scope) of the improvement project and answers the following questions:
1. The business case describes what the project does, how it impacts the strategic business objectives, is used as a motivational tool that describes why the project is worth doing, and it explains the consequences of not doing the project.
2. The problem statement is specific and measurable (quantifiable). It is an indication of how long the problem has existed, describes the impact to the organization, and describes the gap between the current state and the desired state.
3. The scope defines what the team is going to focus their process improvement efforts on, and it will identify those things that are out of scope so that the team doesn’t creep toward areas that are beyond the initial intent of the project.
A chi-square test is a statistical tool used to test for independence or dependence (or goodness-of-fit) between random variables taken from different populations. A chi-square test could also be used for testing for goodness between an observed frequency distribution and an expected frequency distribution. With the chi-square test you are comparing a target variance with an observed variance. It is used to test the independence of two nominal variables. Remember that nominal variables are names or categories only.