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What are you doing today to improve the quality of your life?

9/20/2016

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We often blog about a number of components involved in developing the ultimate strategy in life or work. These involve innovation, creativity, pull activities (those that make you want to get up, get out, and make it happen) coupled with standard activities like your daily routine mixed with continual performance refinement and improvement.

This blog discusses survivability, resilience, and persistence. In this example we use sea turtles. The Institute for Strategic Improvement is a supporter of the Sea turtle Conservancy
www.conserveturtles.org .

Many factors affect our lives and the lives of others. How we poise ourselves to protect the environment and sustainability of green initiatives is an indicator for future quality. That is one of the reasons we support sea turtle conservation.

Do you have any idea what the percentage of sea turtles is that actually survive after hatching? There are a number of factors that affect their chances. The average number of eggs in a sea turtle nest is 110 only an estimated one in 1,000 to 10,000 will survive to adulthood.

Natural predators

Oil spills
Temperature
Weather
Water current
Water contaminants

Illegal shell trade

Light confusion from artificial lighting


Light confusion occurs when the turtles confuse the wavelength of lights and are disoriented from the sea. Use Turtle Safe Lighting - these red lights emit a very narrow portion of the visible light spectrum, which is less intrusive to nesting sea turtles and hatchlings. Want to learn more download the Darker Beaches, Brighter Futures Lighting Guide at http://www.conserveturtles.org/pdf/education/STCDarkerBeachesBrighterFuturesLightingGuide.pdf

Based on the number of constraints and factors they encounter and their size it's impressive the number that do make it.

How do we improve their odds? By improving quality and reducing risk.

We improve their quality by providing education and awareness.
Research
Medical care
Reduction in environmental pollutants

We reduce their risk by providing structured protective habitats in release programs and elimination of hazards.

In this context how do you improve your own survival rate and thrive-al rate in business competition, academics, sports and other venues? The principles are the same quality management. What are you doing today to improve the quality of your life?




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                   Six Sigma

9/18/2016

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 I had a client recently who had a request that I work in what I considered to be an interesting improvement opportunity - “Improvements in “daycare” or “childcare””. Working with Six Sigma and Lean you have opportunities to work in a number of different fields and industries, for me primarily, logistics, manufacturing, and healthcare. The offer to work with childcare was a new one for me but it just shows how universal and complementary improvement work can be for any business. I was excited to see that the business owner had the understanding of and valued lean for the engagement in their processes.

I found that day care businesses are expected to have some of the fastest employment growth through 2020 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the number of privately held day care firms had risen 9% in 2014 with one of the highest growth margins averaging 96%. Lean and six sigma can be used similarly in any industry to improve productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness.
For this particular project scope the request was to look at increasing enrollment, improving safety, and improving their brand through the quality of customer experience.

Using DMAIC there are a number of tangible, measureable ways to develop low and no cost methods to improve business marketing, improve safety processes using Andons and 5S, and then improve the quality perception of the daycare facility by delivering quality services above and beyond just basic childcare by using the “Voice of the Customer”.

Using six sigma in marketing you are able to focus on customer value, communicate your quality, and design change into your processes which enables growth.

Using lean, safety goals are aligned with business objectives to create a link between resource needs and allocation. This is done by defining, recognizing, training and measuring in a metric driven improvement where the systems is flexible to accommodate the culture.

Improving your brand occurs through defining the voice of the customer. This includes what the customers’ requirements are for products and services and what their expectations are both positive and negative including likes, dislikes, problems and suggestions.  It helps determine core business processes involved in their needs and helps the businesses develop the critical to quality elements (CTQs) and develop process metrics (KPOVs). The VOC asks what each customer desires specifically - what is important to them and what do they perceive is a defect in a quality or service.




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Quality Management

9/12/2016

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 Here's a bit of quality information to share on quality improvement.

Quality is the degree to which your company or organization provides its goods or services to its customers safely, effectively, and efficiently while maintaining costs. 
 
Quality Improvement is a systematic approach using specific methods to improve quality while achieving successful and sustained improvement.
 
Each company or business will determine what quality means to them as defined by their customers. It is important to understand what quality means to your company but more importantly to define what quality is to your customers. Your customers drive the requirements of your products, processes, and services.
 
Quality may come in several dimensions for a product or service and here are some examples of what quality may mean from the customer. Everyone defines quality differently when they are the customer. What one person sees as a quality product another may see as unacceptable.
 
Basic premises used in improvement framework.
 
•     Always seek to detect and correct deviations and errors.
•     Small continuous improvement presents better results than random larger improvements.
•     Never use unsupported arbitrary objectives that cannot be supported quantitatively or qualitatively by measure.
•     Never make employees feel fearful to make mistakes or disclose information it impedes effectiveness.
•     Institute a vigorous education and self-improvement program.
•     Create a structure in top management to accomplish transformation.
•     Every department should measure their quality.


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Lean Terms and Quality Management

9/7/2016

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A flow Diagram using the Critical Path Method (CPM) and Value Stream Mapping can identify “lean” areas where waste occurs and efficiency can be gained. The CPM visually models the activities and events of a project as a network. Activities are nodes or stops on a network and events that signify the beginning or ending of activities.

CPM provides the following benefits:
•             Shows the time required to complete the project
•             Specifies the individual activities
•             Shows a graphical view of the project
•             Determine the sequence of the activities
•             Illustrates the precedence and interrelations of each activity
•             Identifies the critical path

Value stream maps show the “value stream” of a process and allow project teams to visualize a process. Value stream mapping is used to identify major sources of non-value added time in a value stream.

Flowcharts - show the steps in a process from start to finish.

Procedures - are documents of instructions that specify how a process is to be carried out.

Work instructions  -specify the steps and order that tasks need to occur in a process.
 
Spaghetti diagrams - identify potential improvements to a physical layout to remove unnecessary movement or bottlenecks. Spaghetti diagrams show all the possible paths an employee can take during completion of their work. This spaghetti diagram is also useful to determine what type of bottlenecks are causing congestion and where workflow is going. The distances can be timed to determine best routes and how to combine similar processes.
 
Critical Path Method (CPM) and Value Stream Mapping can identify areas where waste occurs and efficiency can be gained. The Critical Path Method visually models the activities and events of a project as a network. Activities are nodes on the network and events that signify the beginning or ending of activities are depicted as arcs or lines between the nodes.


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Lean terms and Quality Management

9/5/2016

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When you think of quality and great strategy builders one thing that comes to mind are military operations. Take Naval Aircraft carriers as an example. Flight decks are one of the most dangerous work environments you can imagine but also one of the most exhilarating. The number of quality checks that go into each process are considerable and our armed forces are trained in standard work. “Standard work” is a lean term which means that you standardize work to eliminate unnecessary, unneeded, and wasteful tasks. Standard work helps you to improve your operations whether it is at home or work by developing standard processes for routine operations which have been reviewed to determine they are the best course of action. Managing the arresting wires, Air Traffic Control Center, and landing signals requires precise timing and management. No one does it better than our armed forces. Thank a military member or Veteran today and support our armed forces.

Try standard work at home and at your place of business today by developing templates for your family, coworkers, and employees to use that have visual cues and checklists to speed things up and perform their best.

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    Author

    Robert Kent Six Sigma Black Belt and improvement professional

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