Trends in Lean, Six Sigma & Process Excellence: Meeting Proceedings

At the August 2005 Global Benchmarking Council conference on Trends in Lean, Six Sigma & Process Excellence: From Early Adopters to Agile Innovators, members, speakers and invited guests discussed how to restore balance in their Six Sigma deployment systems. This included debate about “tools for tools sake,” the cult of Six Sigma, Black Belt retention, and other issues critical to sustained success.
Featured Case Studies included the following:

• GE Consumer Finance shared details about its present day Six Sigma in Services, including its new Action Workouts, similar to the old workouts with Kaizen speed and focus.
• NCCI Holdings shared how it leveraged the tools of Six Sigma in the call center under the guise of “Problem Solving” in a skinny, stealth grassroots-up model of deployment.
• Sun Microsystems provided some interesting perspectives, spanning its experience at Allied, Brooks PRI, Sun and as a Baldrige examiner regarding the value of preventative maintenance on the “system,” e.g., reboots to prevent “system crashes” or “system hangs.”
• Xerox shared its successes in deploying Six Sigma in call centers, to drive sales, and with customers.
• The Florida Department of Revenue shared its perspective on the journey to quality for a government organization.
• The U.S. Navy’s Best Manufacturing Practices program gave a demonstration of its Best Practice Database, a free resource that contains over 2,400 best manufacturing practices gleaned from site visits at innovative manufacturing organizations.
• Fuller Jones & Associates challenged common perceptions of what constitutes a successful Six Sigma deployment, e.g., number of belts trained and projects completed. They encouraged the audience to consider behavior-based training as a way to empower managers to lead change across multiple processes simultaneously.