ASQ Six Sigma Forum Magazine

Enjoy the Ride

Occasionally, a book stirs serious thought regarding the philosophy of quality. Years ago, it was Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into the Values. This year, Mathew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work has certainly stirred the author. From Crawford's book, you can draw many parallels to work in Six Sigma. The first is finding this wonderful focus on joy in work, an often-taught lesson from W. Edwards Dewing that his stud...

What's Preventing Prevent?

The struggle to transition from Six Sigma to design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is the same struggle organization face when they attempt to move from finding and fixing problems to preventing the problems from occurring in the first place. The systems in which people work make this transition difficult. In particular, three aspects of the system must change to enable such a transition to take place: 1. People must make it more difficult not to implement DFSS than to implement it. 2. They must establ...

To Market, to Market

The author has been following an interesting conversation regarding the future of Six Sigma. From defect reduction to cost cutting, Six Sigma has evolved in what some might call mini-stages. Six Sigma Marketing (SSM) is a fact-based, disciplined approach for growing market share in targeted product/markets by providing superior value. The target objectives of SSM are increases in market share and top-line revenue. These are external objectives as opposed to the internal objectives of defect r...

By Design

Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the International Conference on Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH) launched a quality-by-design initiative that encourages new drug applications to include a design space and risk-based control strategies. The FDA also encourages the application of simulation experiments, Bayesian adaptive designs and data-mining techniques in the critical path of research investigating efficac...

Conference Call

Program Saves Millions, Prepares Leaders

In an interview, John R. Murphy, assistant VP -- operational process excellence, CSX Corp, talked about his organization's Six Sigma program. Murphy said CSX's program has evolved beyond Six Sigma to an operational excellence program. It is fully interfaced with corporate strategy and has strong executive support -- each major cross-functional process improvement team presents its progress, results and plans in quarterly reviews to the chairman and senior staff. Since 2005, the operational ex...