2019 Year in Review

Hard to believe but another year is almost gone. We’d like to share some of our activities and recognize those who helped make it such a fun, interesting, and productive year. January got off to a good start with the 3rd Annual LSS Champion Roundtable. We had 47 participants from 18 companies, some coming from … Read more

Stability vs. Disruption

Disruption is a very trendy word. Articles about disruptive products, technologies, and services are increasingly common in business magazines. This is especially true in some industries such as consumer electronics and entertainment. Recently I even saw a Linkedin profile of an individual who described himself as a ‘disruptive change agent’. Makes you wonder how he … Read more

Balancing Old and New

Earlier this month I attended two different conferences in which I got a glimpse of the future. The fi­­rst was the Minitab Insights Conference, held in Leesburg, VA (Oct 10-11). Many presenters covered topics that would be familiar to all Green Belts and Black Belts – Design of Experiments, Measurement System Analysis, and Sampling. Other … Read more

The $10,000 Paper Clip

Author: Kurt Middelkoop
Recently I was facilitating an E3 (Economy, Energy, Environmental) workshop with a local company. We spent time learning about lean and how to identify value and non-value add activities. After covering these basics I lead the group out of the classroom to conduct a Gemba walk so they could put the lessons learned to practice. As all LSS practitioners know, direct observation of work activities is fundamental to lean.
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Process Capability: A Critical Management Tool (Part 3)

In the previous blogs we covered the basics of process capability and its use as a Management tool. Part 1 addressed process capability for continuous, normally distributed data. Part 2 covered Short Term vs. Long Term capability, plus capability analysis when the target is not centered between the spec limits. You can read those blogs … Read more

Lean & Six Sigma World Conference 2019

Gaining knowledge is the first step to wisdom. Sharing it is the first step to humanity. ~Author Unknown One of the highlights of the year for TMAC’s Lean Six Sigma team is the Lean & Six Sigma World Conference.  It is my pleasure to share my experiences and key learnings from this year’s conference which … Read more

Getting Lean Right: 10 Factors for Success

Based on a Lean article written by Jamie Flinchbaugh Several years ago I came across an excellent article about deploying a Lean Program. Written by Jamie Flinchbaugh, co-author of The Hitchhikers Guide to Lean: Lessons from the Road (2005), this article first came out in January 2004. Although it has been 15 years since he … Read more