Page 223 - Lean six sigma demystified

Chapter 5 Redu C ing d efe C t S with Six Sigm a 201

• Percent reuse (how much tested stuff did you borrow?)
• Percent new parts (how much stuff is untested)

• Percent unique parts (potential integration difficulties)
• Percent new vendors
• Percent staffed to plan (under or over staffed)
• Percent of time lost to other projects

Have you been putting off measuring your innovation processes? What ideas
can you reuse from this list to get started now? What ideas do these give you
for making immediate improvements in your innovation processes? What mea-
sures of innovation are you already using?

Accidents Don’t Just Happen

This is the sort of headline that you don’t want to read about your company.

Accident kills boy undergoing MRI—A 6-year-old boy was killed when the MRI’s
powerful magnet pulled a metal oxygen tank through the air fracturing the boy’s
skull. Westchester Medical Center officials said the tank had been brought into the
room accidentally. Officials would not say who brought the oxygen tank into the MRI
room.

Forget who brought it into the room. Doesn’t it seem more desirable that it
should be impossible to bring metal into an MRI room? I’ve been through scan-
ners at airports that rant about anything bigger than a quarter. Could such a
device be installed in the doorway to the MRI room? Sure. Could an alarm on
the metal detector prevent the operation of the MRI? Sure. If it saves the life

of one 6-year-old boy, wouldn’t it be worth it?
Now ask: Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why were oxygen tanks loaded or
unloaded anywhere near the MRI? Is the MRI close to the loading dock? Was
the boy brought in from surgery with a tank? Why wasn’t his tank removed
before the MRI?

Using the QI Macros to Analyze Your Data

For some reason, figuring out where to begin seems to be everyone’s biggest
problem. Over the years, I’ve developed a simple method for looking at Excel-
based data and deciding how to process it.