six sigma Archives - Kind-of-Lost

The six W’s are six questions — who, what, when, where, why and how — that you ask about a problem before you try to solve it. They come out of journalism, where a reporter has to establish the facts of a story, and they got adopted into continuous improvement work for exactly the same reason: you cannot fix something you haven’t described properly.

I spent most of my working life as an operations research analyst, building models for manufacturing and supply chain problems. And the honest lesson from all of it is that the modeling was rarely the hard part. Getting a straight answer to these six questions was the hard part.

Continue reading “The 6 W’s Explained: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How”

Back when I was in cubicleland, in my last corporate job, I went through the very good Six Sigma training and certification program offered by my company: Green Belt, Black Belt, and Master Black Belt. I did not get the MBB certification though, time was ripe to quit before I finished it…

Six Sigma, or continuous improvement, had three “tracks” (three ways to go about it): “Variation” would be the traditional way of improving processes with stability and control, “Lean” is the waste-reduction way (and the subject of this post), and “Design” is likely the best and most difficult way because processes are optimal from their inception.

Lean strives to eliminate seven “types” of waste, the “seven wastes”. This technique was developed initially in Japan by Taiichi Ohno but now is learned and used everywhere.

seven wastes

Continue reading “The Seven Wastes of Personal Finance”