e-Zsigma October 2004 Newsletter
Six Sigma SpotLight:Steve
Zinkgraf,
Founder & CEO
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Six Sigma SpotLight is a regular feature of the e-Zsigma newsletter, and allows us to introduce one of the global six sigma community's superstars. Steve Zinkgraf holds a Ph.D. in applied statistics from Texas A&M University. After spending a number of years in academia, Steve joined Motorola in 1988 as a Statistical Quality Engineering Group Leader leading a large electronics plant's SPC effort. Other positions held while at Motorola include Engineering Group Leader, Production Manager and Plant Quality Manager. Steve has also spent time at Compaq Computer Company as a staff statistician and at ABB leading an internal consulting group focused on implementing Six Sigma in combination with Lean Manufacturing systems. Most recently, Steve spent three years at Honeywell (aka AlliedSignal) leading the deployment of Operational Excellence (Six Sigma) in Allied's $4B Engineered Materials Sector. The program yielded over $350M in pre-tax income in three years. Steve currently owns his own consulting firm, Sigma Breakthrough Technologies, Inc., www.sbtionline.com. SBTI specializes in the rapid deployment of Six Sigma and Lean Sigma in large companies and regional consortia. SBTI has contracted to over 45 clients, most of which are members of the Fortune 500. He has overseen the rapid growth of SBTI into a global consulting firm with four international offices. Steve has published over 50 publications to include books, book chapters and technical articles in referenced journals. It was our recent privilege to talk with Steve and discuss his experience over the last two decades, the evolution of Six Sigma including recent trends and innovation and a candid look at some of the bumps and bruises collected along the way… -------------------------------- 1. News: "With your personal history in Six Sigma that goes back to the late 1980's at Motorola, ABB, Allied Signal and Compaq, you are one of the true pioneers of our global community. What, in your opinion, are some of the positive changes you have seen over the last decade or more in Six Sigma, and conversely, what are some of the less than flattering trends… let's call them "bumps and bruises", that we would have been better off without?" 1. Steve: "Motorola officially started Six Sigma in 1987and in the subsequent year, received the Malcolm Baldrige Award, (see http://www.nist.gov/). Initially, not a lot of companies jumped on the Six Sigma "band wagon". Texas Instruments and a couple of others tried, but really didn't get very far. However, when Rich Schroeder joined Allied Signal (aka Honeywell) in 1994, (Allied Signal's CEO) Larry Bossidy was able to take the traditional Motorola Six Sigma and really converted it into a much more business-oriented approach. Actually, I had worked with Rich (Schroeder) when he had done that at ABB (Asea Brown Bovari) earlier. Now, ABB is an interesting company… it is huge, but they have a really tight accounting system they use to manage their global operations, and at anytime, the CEO can literally know where they stand on a day-to-day basis. Rich learned from this experience at ABB., The Motorola Six Sigma, which was really focused on reducing defects and believing good things would come as a result, fell short of ensuring that all (Six Sigma) efforts would somehow directly impacted the bottom line. Moving from a focus on defect reduction to that of bottom line, financial impact was a turning point in the history of Six Sigma. Six Sigma moving strongly into non-manufacturing arenas has been good even though Motorola had already done a pretty good job at doing that in the first few years of Six Sigma. I think the recognition by companies actually doing Six Sigma that it does have an ROI (Return on Investment) is a big deal since TQM (Total Quality Management) didn't really come through with the goods. When I look at the good things, I see a lot of companies really leveraging Six Sigma in a good way. I think the best thing that happened is these new corporate positions, Master Black Belt (MBB), Black Belt (BB) and Green Belt (GB), as well as people getting paid a premium. My own son, who is a physical education major, holds a great paying job with a large insurance company just because of his Six Sigma background. It is terrific that Six Sigma has been able to impact so many people in a positive way. On "the bumps and bruises" side, I've been struggling with how the original Motorola Six Sigma, which was really focused on defect reduction, cycle time improvement, but most importantly, the infrastructure to rigorously track defects and assess the status of quality systems of the company, has been completely lost in Six Sigma (today). I would say that there isn't a single company, now, including Motorola, that really tracks defects in a systematic fashion across the corporation, and really run their operations according to defect reduction. When I joined Motorola in 1988, I became an operations manager for one of their very large engine control lines in Seguin, Texas, and without any real manufacturing background - I came right out of academia - I was able to very effectively run a very complex manufacturing line by focusing on defect reduction and creating high-performance work teams. Somehow, that has disappeared, and now, when we look at a sigma value that someone reports, it is just a very, very rough estimate, probably based on a snapshot. In Motorola, and where I worked, they really did track every defect, their defect reduction activities and they had a very extensive infrastructure supporting that. That, in my opinion, has been completely lost. A recent trend has been the hiring in of Six Sigma expertise by many companies, rather than developing their own employees. I think that this is just criminal, and I have been involved with some companies that have done this, and I hated to see it happen. When deploying Six Sigma, a company is essentially only four or five months away from having a lot of BB's and GB's, and yet they seem to want to take a short cut. There are thousands of pseudo-experts that have popped up everywhere, and when you look at the Six Sigma books on the market today, many of them have never been involved in a Six Sigma deployment… they've just dusted off their old TQM stuff and rolled it in. So now the consumer gets confused because they assume these experts are truly experts, and in reality, they are just jumping on the band wagon. That has been a disappointing." 2. News: "In a recent article in Reuters that was published on May 13, 2004, (see http://www.forbes.com/business/newswire/2004/05/13/rtr1371201.html) it is suggested by its author, Michael Flaherty, that Six Sigma is no longer enough. The article ends with the comment from business management consulting guru, Michael Hammer, "Six Sigma will get you to parity, but not ahead of your competition…It's for fixing problems, not for innovation." How do you respond to the suggestion that Six Sigma methodology is too cumbersome to effect rapid improvement, and that it does not promote or inspire innovation?" 2. Steve: "When they say it is too cumbersome, I'm not even sure what Six Sigma they are talking about. I was involved with Six Sigma's launch at Allied Signal, and Larry Bossidy (Allied Signal CEO) announced that (Six Sigma) had arrived in September of 1994, and by January of 1995, I believe about 250 BB's were trained across the company and in my own $4billion sector, we were able to generate $50million of cash by the following June…. How cumbersome is that!? When you consider 3M, and Jim McNerney, (3M Chairman and CEO, see previous article on ISSSP 2004 Conference at http://www.irun.com/users/568/downloads/15-Jun-2004-01.htm), told me personally, when we started then out on Six Sigma, that they would have the fastest rollout of Six Sigma ever and 3 weeks after the executive training session of their top 90 people, tons of waves of BB's were launched and they started getting results almost immediately… certainly within four months. So, to say that Six Sigma is cumbersome?… I don't know what they are talking about. When they say that Six Sigma is too narrow, I can't understand it, since I have seen Six Sigma applied in almost every part of a business. Then, there is Michael Hammer's comment in the article you referred to, suggesting that with Six Sigma, you can achieve parity but it's only for problem solving, and it limits innovation. I have trained hundreds of BB's at Allied Signal and my company has probably trained 20,000 BB's, and in just about every project, there has been some sort of innovative solution that resulted from the systematic application of a standard roadmap and set of tools. DFSS has been consistently delivering innovative proactive solutions to satisfying customers. So, when I hear Michael Hammer say that Six Sigma doesn't help, and I look back to how much damage reengineering did, and realized he himself waved his hands between the as-is processes and should-be processes without any tools in between… Six Sigma provides exactly that. His Reengineering theory with a Six Sigma improvement engine could have actually worked. I don't know who these people are talking to about Six Sigma, or where they are getting their ideas, but I would love to debate these guys in an open forum. I think they are completely missing the boat, since they are not describing the Six Sigma I've seen in some 48 companies I've worked in." 3. News: "We know that you and you wife, Patricia, are very involved in the Austin Shakespeare Festival, (ASF, see http://www.austinshakespeare.org/), and the project to build the Austin Shakespeare Festival Theatre. In fact, both you and your wife are Board Members of ASF, and you are an actor within that company. Can you tell us a little about your history and involvement with ASF, and how you have incorporated that into your work with SBTI?" 3. Steve: "It really came full circle since it was my involvement with Six Sigma that led to my discovery of Shakespeare. When we would do our executive sessions, we would always play the rousing "Band of Brother's" speech delivered by Kenneth Branagh in 1989's film, "Henry V", (see editor's note below). I had been a community theatre actor for a number of years, and I felt that I could probably do this speech myself instead of dragging the video around, so I worked with a University of Texas drama department coach who was excellent, and I just got hooked on it. This led me to start working with a group called "Shakespeare & Company" up in Lennox, Massachusetts, (http://www.shakespeare.org/), and as it turns out, their Artistic Director/CEO, Tina Packer, was interested in getting into the corporate setting, so we had the MBB program going, and I invited Tina Packer as well as another Shakespeare student who was a management consultant, and we created a two-day Shakespeare and Leadership course. Tina teaches a course in the Executive MBA program at Columbia University, so she was the perfect ally. When you look at the Shakespeare plays, it all starts making since, since in probably 85% of Shakespeare's plays, the lines are all rhetoric - somebody trying to convince somebody else. Of course, BB's and MBB's should be very good at rhetoric - they need to be good at making their case very systematically. The basis of rhetoric is logos, pathos, and ethos. We have designed our curriculum address those three different areas… Logos being the logic of things, and of course, Six Sigma logic prevails with standard roadmaps and linked tools that lead to a logical conclusion. Ethos relates to the credibility and ethics you have. Pathos is the emotional side that most Six Sigma MBB's, BB's and GB's completely miss! They have a very difficult time showing passion about what they are doing, and so we include that in our training. We tell our students that everything they do must be balanced around these essential core competencies, logos, pathos and ethos, and that we are going to develop them in these three areas, and they are going to exit our program much differently than when they first came in. The power of Shakespeare done well, is that the actors directly connect with the audience. I remember bringing some MBB's to Romeo and Juliet, and they were amazed that Romeo would look right at them and talk to them directly and Juliet actually kissed one of them. It is this whole idea of connecting with your audience, connecting with the people you are serving that is so important. Editor's
Note: Visit Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/079284615X/002- 4. News: "No doubt leveraging your past experiences as well as your Ph.D. in Applied Statistics, you have been extensively involved in the evolution of what is commonly referred to as "Design for Six Sigma", (DFSS). Can you discuss with our readers any recent innovations in DFSS and what we can expect to see in the future of that discipline and methodology?" Scroll up to right-hand side of page to continue interview... |
Steve
Zinkgraf, CEO & Founder, SBTI. Click here to learn more about SBTI Continued from left panel... 4. Steve: "From SBTI's standpoint, we have done a lot of work in really hammering a set of tools and a roadmap to develop the Voice of the Customer (VOC) in a systematic way. DFSS is taught by a lot of different providers, but I believe they pay lip service to VOC and try to capture the whole thing in a Quality Function Deployment (QFD) process. However, there is a huge amount of work that needs to be done, even before you enter anything into a QFD. In fact the entire first week of our DFSS Black Belt training addresses our roadmap for identifying the VOC. I've been involved in several actual design projects that while the product came out very interesting and innovative, they did a very poor job of actually understanding what the customer really wanted, and failed miserably. One innovation has been to really develop an extensive roadmap using a lot of tools in a sequence to provide a clear description of the VOC. Then, when you do your QFD, everything makes sense and you are on the right track. A second innovation is one that I had piloted in Allied Signal, and that is to have an extensive curriculum, combining both marketing and technical people in the same program. There would be a set of core modules that both groups would take, and break-out modules so that at one point, the marketing people go off to their corner and the technical people got off to their corner, and they learn the tools that are specific to them. This resulted in a huge amount of synergy between the two groups. That is the biggest innovation, because there aren't a lot of people doing addressing the potential synergies between marketing and R&D. Although it may not be considered an innovation, the third opportunity is mapping the DFSS curriculum into each company's stage gate process so that every company has a totally different curriculum and sequence based on how they execute their DFSS projects." 5. News: "With the growth and, dare I say, maturation of the Six Sigma global community, we are seeing more and more companies hiring Six Sigma-experienced people to either compliment or replace altogether the need to train resources in house… "Why spend the money on training when the talent is already out there?" If you were speaking to a company that was advertising to hire a Six Sigma MBB, what words of advise would you have for them? What would you consider a world-class process for training MBB's that would yield high-quality leaders?" 5. Steve: "The message to me, if a company decides to go out and hire in the talent is that they have done a terrible job of recruiting in the past, because they have no people that would be talented enough to do Six Sigma. This situation of course is not ever really the case. Every company consists of very good people. In my experience, and as I have mentioned earlier, is that any company is only four or five months away from having as big a cadre of BB's as they want to have. Why in the world would they want to hire someone in at a better salary and a different bonus structure, who doesn't know the company and may not even know Six Sigma that well? I think that companies really miss the boat when they hire in talent directly - certainly at the BB and GB level. I can see a company initially hiring in a few MBB's in order to get the (Six Sigma) deployment going, but that may only represent 15% of the total they will need over the long run. They should develop the rest of their MBB's internally and use consultants to cover the MBB requirement until they have developed their own. With our MBB program, we generally expect about a year of BB work, some major hits in the project area, and another year of development, so you are talking about 2-3 years for MBB development, which is pretty reasonable. The problem with hiring from outside is that every company has a different Six Sigma program - there is no standardization whatsoever. Most MBB's that we've seen that haven't come out of our program or don't consult for us are very light on methodology, statistics and deployment capability and they have generally only had one cycle of learning. Companies are hiring in MBB's, often at six figure salaries and these MBB's really don't know Six Sigma that well. I think a company puts itself at risk when they hire in talent. The other downside of hiring in talent is that when you hire sixteen BB's from four different companies, they will each probably have a different set of roadmaps and tools… in fact, we actually had a client who hired in 8-10 MBB's, and all those people did was argue every day about what the roadmap was, when we had already provided that client with a roadmap that was working. I don't really understand the mentality of it at all, and I would offer that that companies who depend on hiring in talent for Six Sigma don't do well (at Six Sigma) at all." 6. News: "Over the last few years, Six Sigma has evolved from its original application in the manufacturing sector, into a universally recognized methodology and strategy for improving any business, regardless of industry. Originally, that challenge was how to apply Six Sigma to the service side of a manufacturing firm. Now it is being widely applied to the Finance and Shared Services sector, and that is a tremendous change. Can you give us some of your insights into the challenges of implementing Six Sigma in a services company, and how this change is reflected in the actual training that takes place?" 6. Steve: "I'm always surprised when people say that Six Sigma was a manufacturing initiative from the start. People don't realize that Motorola in the late 1980's and early 1990's were doing some very innovative and successful work in the transactional arena, focusing more on cycle time than defects per unit. Their biggest case study was reducing the amount of time it took to apply for a patent - it went form 1 ½ years to 6 months, and there were all kinds of other case studies like that. I think that part of problem with Six Sigma being so slow to go into these other markets, and also being slow to get results, is that the process improvement roadmap for a transactional company is very different from a manufacturing company. Most consulting companies out there essentially take their manufacturing material and put in a couple of administrative examples and start teaching it to their clients. These people who are sitting there, and they are smart people, who may be in finance or human resources, and the instructor is talking about Gage R & R, (see http://www.isixsigma.com/dictionary/Gage_R&R-147.htm), and measurement studies, and that doesn't even make sense! We took a blank sheet approach, and brought in several people who had spent a lot of time in insurance companies, hotel chains, and things like that, but who also had a technical engineering background, and we created a roadmap aimed specifically at transactional people, looking at the different classes of problems they had and the way that they solved them. This has been a raging success. We have one client who was using what I will call the "old stuff", which was manufacturing-oriented, and they absolutely loved the new curriculum. For example, you might want to teach a transactional person five or six different types of process maps, whereas in manufacturing, you'll probably only want to teach them one or two. In manufacturing, you'll want them to perform Gage R & R studies, but in a transactional arena, you will want them to know how to set up a measurement system and make sure the data is valid. These are totally different kinds of things. You don't worry so much about Cp, Cpk, Pp, Ppk in a transactional setting, but you are going to worry a lot more about getting the right metrics, setting the right goals, and figuring out how to get there. The statistics are generally lighter for transactional, but then you also have the differences across the transactional functions. If I was running a large, transactional company, I would have a GB for human resources that would be different from a GB for finance or a legal department. Each one of those functions has a different class of problems, different data availability, and they need a different set of tools. To really be successful, you really need to customize transactional (training) to fit the area that is solving the problem… And we haven't seen that yet." 7. News: "Your company, Sigma Breakthrough Technologies has grown over the years to include four international offices, with training that is delivered in over eight languages. What is your vision for SBTI for the future, and what global influences are inspiring this vision?" 7. Steve: "We would like to be more focused on the Enterprise Performance Improvement starting with the development of a good strategy (with our clients), and then working towards the solutions that will allow their strategy to become a reality. Part of the solution might be Six Sigma, part of it Lean (Manufacturing), part of it Lean Sigma. Part of it may be how to implement effectively an SAP program, some of it may be a systematic approach to reducing health care claims. What we are looking at now is how to really help a company develop a strategy and then getting the right strategic partners together that can offer turn-key solutions for very specific problems that most companies have, and having everyone speaking off the same script that we are speaking off. On the global side, it is very interesting. Most of our clients have a global presence, and it has been working very well to have the ABB model of, "think global, act local". That will always be part of our strategy of finding partners in other areas. We've had our joint ventures for about two years now, so we have already worked the bugs out and now we are going to be looking at expanding that."
Rod Morgan, e-Zsigma, Inc. -------------------------------- If you have a six sigma "superstar" you would like to have featured in SpotLight, send your submission to news@e-zsigma.com. Please include in your email; 1. a brief biography of the person you are recommending 2. the reason you are submitting their name 3. a photograph or "action shot" if you have one 4. your nominee's contact information (so that the e-Zsigma news team can obtain their consent as well as conduct an brief interview)
If you have any questions regarding Six Sigma Spotlight, please contact e-Zsigma at news@e-zsigma.com. Your feedback is always appreciated.
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