Continuing Education

Improving processes begins with the customer – internal or external. Understanding which customers and which requirements are most critical to your business determines which processes should be improved.  Before relying on advanced Six Sigma techniques, significant process learning can be achieved using tools such as trend charts, Pareto charts, histograms and fishbone diagrams.

Six Sigma performance is a worthy business goal.  However, the investment required to train Green Belts and Black Belts is significant, as is the cultural shift that may be needed to embrace advanced statistical methods. Fortunately, it is not an all-or-nothing proposition for your organization.  You can begin the journey simply by enhancing current process improvement techniques.

Who Should Attend

• Manager of administration, operations or manufacturing
• Process owner, manager or analyst
• Functional or project manager
• Member of a process improvement team
• Anyone actively involved in your organization's process or quality improvement efforts

What You Will Learn

• Measure and analyze process performance
• Determine what level of quality your process is capable of delivering
• Recognize trends in performance
• Identify the factors that limit quality, slow service time and increase costs
• Understand variability and how it drives your improvement tactics
• Evaluate and apply process improvement alternatives
• Develop results-oriented solutions that will yield improved business results

Course Outline

The Customer First

1. Who are your key customers
2. What are their most important expectations
3. Performance versus expectations
4. Kano model
5. Getting/validating customer requirements
6. Service and product quality characteristics

Measuring Process Quality

1. How my customers measure quality
2. How I measure quality
3. Determining pulse points
4. Collecting data - the check sheet
5. Evaluating data - the trend chart
6. Setting targets

Analyzing Performance

1. Identifying issues - Pareto analysis
2. Histograms and process distributions
3. Understanding variation
   1. the control chart
4. Root cause analysis
   1. the scatter diagram
   2. the fishbone diagram

Your Improvement Strategy

1. Analyzing process flowcharts
2. Improvement alternatives
3. Identifying "quick hits"
4. Options and consequences
5. Benchmarking
6. Process redesign
7. Did we meet the goal