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| Total Unique Visitors: 582 |
| Visitors Out: 3966 |
| Total Visitors Out: 4223 |
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| End this cheap flight madness! |
| 2008-07-21 07:45:49 |
In a century from now people will reflect and realise that the cheap flights we now enjoy were economic madness. The newspapers have been raving recently about the favourable exchange rate and the delights of Christmas shopping in New York thereby ignoring the warnings about global warming and air travel. It’s still the fastest growing [...]...
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| No waste packaging |
| 2008-07-19 11:42:57 |
[link]
Tofu packed into balloons, by Kamakura-komachi?! Surprisingly a great example for reduced packaging: Its elastic material is extensively stretched, and when pierced with a toothpick, the balloon bursts and only a tiny bit remains. How amazing! REDUCE with more flexibility! The same packaging concept is also applied to a pudding.
Japanese Design #7: A How-to-Reduce-Packaging Journal [...]...
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| The Toyota Way - Part 3 |
| 2008-07-17 23:17:18 |
This post continues my summary of the The Toyota Way by Dr Jeff K. Liker.
Principle 3: Use the “Pull-System” to Avoid Over Production
The pull-system hinges on the idea of restocking inventory based on the day-to day demand of the customers rather than on a fixed schedule or system. This calls for a flexible system [...]...
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| Killer Kaizen |
| 2008-07-16 11:17:07 |
photo credit: keatl
Bill Shankly quote:
Someone said “football is more important than life and death to you” and I said “Listen, it’s more important than that.”
Is the elimination of waste more important than life and death?
A major criticism of the Toyota Production System is that while it:
may bring good benefit for companies, the system may [...]...
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| A lunatic extremist fringe |
| 2008-07-15 20:31:09 |
Fanatics have a habit of undermining their own cause: just look at animal liberationists, and how their gruesome antics diverted attention from worthwhile campaigns aimed at factory farming. A lunatic fringe now threatens to sabotage the global warming debate in the same way.
In the US, the think-tank that accused Al Gore of hypocrisy over his [...]...
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| TQM -v- six-sigma |
| 2008-07-14 08:30:50 |
TQM objectives
Total Quality Management (TQM) is a structured system for satisfying internal and external customers and suppliers by integrating the business environment, continuous improvement, and breakthroughs with development, improvement, and maintenance cycles while changing organizational culture. TQM aims for quality principles to be applied broadly throughout an organization or set of business processes.
Comparison with Six [...]...
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| Weekly Link Carnival |
| 2008-07-11 08:30:36 |
photo credit: Pete Kim
Every week I present a summary of the best posts from the blog-o-sphere which have caught my eye, and here they are:...
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| Six Sigma and Multitasking |
| 2008-07-11 01:00:03 |
photo credit: an untrained eye (is elsewhere)
I’ve mentioned before that Six Sigma certainly has its critics, and here are some more:
almost five dozen companies that have adopted Six Sigma and found that the vast majority have underperformed the stock market … while fully 86 percent of them use Six Sigma or similar continuous-improvement methodologies, [...]...
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| Toyotas Lean Homes |
| 2008-07-08 07:04:18 |
[link] [link]
If Toyota built homes what would they look like? Apparently they’ve been in the business for making homes for over twenty years!
Since 1975, Toyota has been building steel-frame houses designed to withstand earthquakes and typhoons and keep out burglars. So far, demand for such durable homes has been modest in Japan, where traditional wooden [...]...
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| Process Capability Guide |
| 2008-07-08 01:35:53 |
Cp index
Cp index is a statistical measure of process capability. This means that it is a measure of how capable a process is of producing output within specification limits. This measurement only has meaning when the process being examined is in a state of statistical control. Cp disregards centering, and is insensitive to “shifts and [...]...
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| Republicans say: global warming is crap |
| 2008-07-06 13:35:42 |
Much has changed since then, both in terms of the public profile of climate change and the growing certainty of mainstream scientists that humans are to blame. So the magazine recently repeated the poll. The result?Just 13% of the respondents said yes. (link).
So as the evidence for global warming increases, Republicans are actually getting [...]...
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| Zen & Art of The Toyota Way |
| 2008-07-05 01:33:02 |
photo credit: Dunechaser
She came trotting by with her watering pot between those two doors, going from the corridor to her office, and she said, “I hope you are teaching Quality to your students.” This in a la?de?da, singsong voice of a lady in her final year before retirement about to water her plants. That [...]...
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| The slow decline of quality? |
| 2008-07-05 01:19:02 |
If the volume of searches is anything to go by on Google it looks like that six sigma, lean, TQM and ISO 9001 are all in slow decline, whereas lean six sigma is increasing in popularity. Strangely, although the volume of searches is in decline, the news articles published on each subject are either static [...]...
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| 6 steps for six-sigma success |
| 2008-07-04 07:49:43 |
Discover: recognize the need for Six Sigma and explore its potential impact on the company.
Decide: senior management approves the Six Sigma initiative, and then defines the purpose and scope of Six Sigma.
Organize: establish financial targets; set time lines; train senior executive team and Deployment Champions who are responsible for planning and mechanism building.
Initialize: create detailed [...]...
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| Atheism: A Very Short Introduction |
| 2008-07-02 19:47:41 |
Atheism: A Very Short Introduction by Julian Baggini
Atheism is often considered to be a negative, dark, and pessimistic belief which is characterized by a rejection of values and purpose and a fierce opposition to religion. “Atheism: A Very Short Introduction” sets out to dispel the myths that surround atheism, and shows how a life without [...]...
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| Private equity is dirty capitalism |
| 2008-06-29 19:43:40 |
photo credit: Potatojunkie
Damon Buffini is the most important man you’ve probably never heard of (here’s some more “rogues” link). The managing partner of Permira, Europe’s biggest private equity outfit, he is the public face of an investment revolution that has changed the lives of millions. Put simply, private equity means that a group of [...]...
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| Top 3 six-sigma critical success factors |
| 2008-06-27 21:53:12 |
Senior Management Commitment
Implementation of Six Sigma represents a long term commitment. The success of Six Sigma projects depends substantially on the level of commitment by the senior management. General Electric’s success with Six Sigma is due in large part to the role that Jack Welch (former CEO) played in relentlessly advocating Six Sigma and integrating [...]...
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| Don’t fall for the airline propaganda |
| 2008-06-26 09:52:10 |
For all its green rhetoric, Labour has a blind spot about air travel. The recent Climate Change Bill, for instance, doesn’t include aviation in its carbon reduction targets. The Treasury has also dismissed Tory calls for domestic flights to pay tax on fuel, saying that would be inappropriate in a multilateral context, despite the fact [...]...
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| Got H2O: Worldwide Water Access (swivel) |
| 2008-06-25 22:45:59 |
Sources: World Health Organization (http://www.who.int/whosis/i…) / Swivel
Photo Credit: ducrest_marc
Access to clean, affordable drinking water and sanitation is [...]...
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| Six sigma training tips |
| 2008-06-24 10:44:53 |
photo credit: origami_madness
With six sigma training the aim is not to convert Six Sigma practitioners into statistical experts. Instead, it is to give them the knowledge essential to their success in obtaining business results.
So what should you drop based on the target audience you are trying to reach, here are some ideas:
Hypothesis tests, such [...]...
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| Kansei Engineering: affection + emotion into design |
| 2008-06-23 07:00:20 |
photo credit: imranchaudhry
Kansei is a Japanese term where the syllable kan means sensitivity and sei means sensibility, together it addresses the psychological feeling or image of a product. It is used to express the quality of an object for producing pleasure through its use taking into account subjective issues (emotion, affect, perceptions, sensations…) in [...]...
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| 26 climate-change myths |
| 2008-06-21 19:00:17 |
Here is a great article from the New Scientist which lists details on the twenty-six most common climate myths and misconceptions link. These are:
Human CO2 emissions are too tiny to matter
We can’t do anything about climate change
The ‘hockey stick’ graph has been proven wrong
Chaotic systems are not predictable
We can’t trust computer models of climate
They predicted [...]...
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| Six-sigma is a marketing ploy |
| 2008-06-20 06:59:52 |
Apparently Six Sigma is a marketing ploy
First, it offers easy money, because both the training and qualification are controlled as though the concepts are unique and innovative and can only be understood, taught and implemented in one way. In reality, many consultants who promote the Six Sigma methodology lack consistency in their training materials and [...]...
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| What not to ask presidential candidates |
| 2008-06-18 18:59:11 |
photo credit: heraldpost
What is your plan for Iraq? At every press conference, interview and fund-raising event, the presidential candidates are all asked this same pointless question. And it’s pointless because next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq.
A planned withdrawal from Iraq should start now. To say longer is really just an embodiment [...]...
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| What’s San-Gen Shugi? |
| 2008-06-17 06:58:36 |
This article in the Harvard Business Review looks at how staff are trained in the Toyota Production System (TPS) to make improvements in the production process. The article picks out some of the key differences between TPS and the way most American and European enterprises tackle productivity improvement. I’ll focus on two points:
There is no [...]...
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| The Toyota Way - Part 2 |
| 2008-06-15 13:08:26 |
The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer
Toyota developed the after World War II. While Ford and GM used mass production and economies of scale, Toyota faced very different business conditions. Toyota’s market was very small but it had to produce a variety of vehicles on the same assembly line to satisfy [...]...
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| Summary of the six-sigma CONTROL stage |
| 2008-06-13 12:50:53 |
The Control phase aims to establish standard measures to maintain performance and to correct problems as needed, including problems with the measurement system. This includes:
validate measurement systems;
verify process long-term capability;
implement process control with control plan to ensure that the same problems don’t reoccur by continually monitoring the processes that create the products [...]...
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| Iraq isn’t like Vietnam - it’s much worse |
| 2008-06-12 00:50:22 |
photo credit: debaird
Forget all the talk about Iraq being as bad as the Vietnam War because its far worse.
The US was able to walk away from Vietnam with relative impunity because Vietnam was essentially a peripheral country. Iraq, by contrast, is a key factor, in global oil supplies, so an American withdrawal would be [...]...
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| Quality Management Tools |
| 2008-06-10 12:50:13 |
Quality Management Tools [link]
Operational Definitions - created by Navy Total Quality Leadership Office.
21 pages. Part of Basic Tools for Process Improvement Handbook
[PDF] Adobe Acrobat Reader
Brainstorming - created by Navy Total Quality Leadership Office.
19 pages. Part of Basic Tools for Process Improvement Handbook
[PDF] Adobe Acrobat Reader
Team Decision-Making [...]...
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| SMED summary |
| 2008-06-09 11:29:27 |
Revolution in Manufacturing: Single-minute Exchange of Die System
Content: Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Ease of Reading: Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Technical Knowledge: Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Overall: Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
“The slower but consistent tortoise causes less waste and is much more desirable than the speedy hare that races ahead [...]...
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| Smile - you’re already on camera! |
| 2008-06-07 23:29:06 |
photo credit: chez_worldwide
When historians look back on New Labour they may conclude that its worst sin was not mendacity or incompetence, but the way it destroyed privacy in this country. We are the most spied-upon society in Europe, with more CCTV cameras (an estimated 4.2 million ) than the rest of the EU combined. [...]...
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| Summary of the six-sigma IMPROVE stage |
| 2008-06-06 11:27:34 |
The Improve phase focuses on developing ideas to remove root causes of variation, testing and standardizing those solutions. This involves:
identify ways to remove causes of variation;
verify critical Inputs;
discover relationships between variables;
establish operating tolerances which are the upper and lower specification limits (the engineering or customer requirement) of a process for judging [...]...
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| Ex-presidents are as bad as Bush |
| 2008-06-04 23:26:24 |
photo credit: Michael Heilemann
To listen to the experts moaning on about America’s mistakes in Iraq you’d think their previous record in the Middle East had been a triumph. What short memories people have:
Jimmy Carter, for instance, now writes books condemning Americas foreign policies, yet he was the president who bungled the Iranian hostage crisis [...]...
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| Deming’s Funnel Simulator |
| 2008-06-03 11:25:42 |
photo credit: hyperboreal
Dr. W Edwards Deming was an advocate of achieving Quality through Process Management. He has described the adverse effects of tampering with a stable process in his book titled ‘Out of the Crisis’. He demonstrated through the famous Funnel Experiment how adjustment of a stable process can lead to an increase in [...]...
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| Bush is still wearing his running shoes |
| 2008-06-02 20:12:14 |
Politicians are never judged in isolation as their popularity always depends on how well the other guy is doing. For example, Ronald Reagan had a favourite joke to illustrate the point. Two men are walking in the forest when a bear comes rushing towards them Seeing the first man bend down to put on his [...]...
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| Free six sigma publications |
| 2008-06-01 08:07:32 |
photo credit: foreby
Scribd is a free online library where anyone can upload documents. I found the following:
Introduction to Engineering Statistics and Six Sigma
Statistical Quality Control and Design of Experiments and Systems
531 pages with 114 Figures
Six Sigma Orientation presentation
Introduction to six sigma
Well worth a visit and a download I think!...
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| Let Hitler speak |
| 2008-05-30 20:06:29 |
photo credit: fortinbras
Are some words so dangerous they must be locked away?
The question is currently an issue of fierce debate in Germany where a leading historian has called for Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic screed Mein Kampf (”My Struggle”) to be published openly for the first time since 1945. It is available for sale in Britain [...]...
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| Minitab Resources |
| 2008-05-29 08:06:22 |
photo credit: Librarian by Day
I encourage you to visit the resources section of the Minitab website. You’ll gain access to fantastic tutorials such as the following:
Control Limits: Optimize the Performance of Your Control Charts
Learn when you may want to set the control limits on your Control Charts and two simple ways to do it.
Graphing
Minitab’s [...]...
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| Summary of the six-sigma ANALYZE stage |
| 2008-05-29 07:13:52 |
In the Analyze phase, the measurements collected in the Measure phase are analyzed so that hypotheses about the root causes of variations in the measurements can be generated and the hypothesis subsequently validated. It is at this stage that practical business problems are turned into statistical problems and analyzed as statistical problems. This includes:
generate [...]...
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