Miller asserts that some organizations gain high value from their data, but pay way too much for the knowledge. This is typical of many Six Sigma companies. Six Sigma companies, for the most part, understand listening to the Voice of the Process better than many other organizations. They apply proven, disciplined techniques of project management and statistical problem solving to get to the bottom of chronic, entrenched problems. Payback from these programs is huge.
However, many Six Sigma Black Belts spend an inordinate amount of time scrubbing and massaging data in order to get something useful. Miller refers to this effort as the Six Sigma Data Shuffle.
Some enterprises pursue data for data’s sake, building elaborate data collection systems that effectively protect the user from their customer, but provide little or no additional value to the business.
A third data nightmare has the worst of both worlds: they pay a high price for data, but have almost nothing to show for their efforts. This is typical of mature organizations with a long tradition of inspecting quality into a product. These businesses may have enormous file cabinets full of hand-written data sheets. Data are written on an inspection sheet and then filed away.
Hertzler Systems (www.hertzler.com)
Hertzler Systems has been a leader in Statistical Process Control and Six Sigma for over twenty years, and includes a diverse customer base in service, transactional and manufacturing environments;
Hertzler Systems Inc.
www.hertzler.com
Adrienne DePew
Communications Manager
info@hertzler.com
800.958.2709
