Interest in Six Sigma meanwhile is an area where the United States scores highly.
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Bulriss also sped up the Six Sigma quality program, something AlliedSignal managers know all too well.
But implementing Six Sigma was nothing less than a metamorphosis of how GE employees thought and acted.
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His job was to infuse the gospel of Six Sigma into Tyco management during its post-Koslowski recovery.
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Your best seller may lose an account or your six sigma expert may get a process messed up.
Total Quality Management (TQM, ) Continuous Improvement (CI, ) and Six Sigma programs all have been glorified by companies hoping to improve product or service quality.
Secondly what the US does have a strong interest in is incremental change as represented by Six Sigma and technology transfer, two old school terms.
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Six years at MIT gave me a six sigma perspective that helps me recognize the inputs and outputs I need each day to achieve my desired results.
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In order to apply Six Sigma you need lots of data and you must be able to dig into it, analyze it and eliminate sources of variation.
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The central idea of Six Sigma is to reduce the number of mistakes, or defects--be that faulty Zip drives or misaddressed envelopes--to less than 3 defects per million.
Merck Chief Executive RichardClarkRichard Clark is pleasing Wall Street by promising that he will trim costs and force a new level of efficiency using tools like Six Sigma.
Merck Chief Executive Richard Clark is pleasing Wall Street by promising that he will trim costs and force a new level of efficiency using tools like Six Sigma.
Six Sigma was too closely associated with cost reduction.
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They have enrolled the company on the so-called "Six Sigma" program, a management program championed by, among others, General Electric's Jack Welsh and used to great effect at Sierk's old employer, AlliedSignal.
The program--known as the clunky "At the Customer, For the Customer"--taps the parent company's wealth of expertise in the vaunted Six Sigma defect-reduction method, just-in-time manufacturing and such management pursuits as succession planning.
However, as Mr Bonsignore takes over that task, a longer-term question still remains about the viability of conglomerates in an age in which management people talk about core competences even more than six sigma.
Healthcare has to apply Six Sigma-type principles.
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While other business processes like distribution have improved by leaps and bounds thanks to supply-chain technology innovation and that old stalwart, Six Sigma, the revenue process is still one of the most inefficient areas of enterprise today.
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Process reengineering takes many forms--notably the Six Sigma philosophy popularized by former General Electric (nyse: GE - news - people ) Chief Jack Welch --but the general idea is that by minimizing mistakes and eliminating waste, the performance of the company will improve.
That said, there is increasing evidence that an over-reliance on planning, management and measurement in the front-end of innovation as evidenced by the movement of back-end processes such as lean and six sigma to the front end of innovation, are producing poor returns on innovation effort.
Make our old denture-breath company six-sigma ... and lean ... and fast!
Even the subprime crisis with the accompanying talk of six-sigma tail risk must be viewed through the lens of a history littered with credit booms followed by busts, many of them real estate related.
James McNerney, a former boss of 3M, a manufacturer, damaged the company's innovation engine by trying to apply six-sigma principles (which are intended to reduce errors on production lines) to the entire company, including the research laboratories.
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