Six Sigma – Part 3: DMAIC: Analyzing

In Six Sigma - Part 3: DMAIC: Analyzing, you'll learn ...

• How you can use basic charts and graphs to objectively eliminate trivial and non-important factors, zeroing in on the true root cause
• Value analysis, normal variation, and analyzing for capability
• Analyzing your own measurements and how to glean insight just from watching a process in operation
• How to measure the risk and confidence in your analysis decisions

Overview

Six Sigma is the single most effective problem-solving methodology for improving business and organizational performance. There’s not a business, technical, or process challenge that Six Sigma can’t improve. The world’s top corporations have used it to increase their profits collectively by more than $100 billion over the past ten years. In certain corporations, indicating Six Sigma proficiency on your résumé is now a prerequisite to moving into a position in management.

Simply stated, Six Sigma is about applying a structured, scientific method to improve any aspect of a business, organization, process, or person. It’s about engaging in disciplined data collection and analysis to determine the best possible ways of meeting your customers’ needs while satisfying yours and minimizing wasted resources and maximizing profit in the process.

This course is Part 3 of a 5-part series based on the popular book Six Sigma for Dummies, 2nd Edition¹. Despite its astounding effectiveness, few outside of the community of Six Sigma practitioners know what Six Sigma is all about. Six Sigma for Dummies provides a fast and easy way to understand and implement Six Sigma. In fact, Six Sigma For Dummies is the most straightforward, non-intimidating guide available.

This course, Part 3 of the series, covers the Analyze phase of Six Sigma’s DMAIC problem-solving road map. This phase is where you objectively eliminate trivial and non-important factors, zeroing in on the true root cause.

Module 1 shows how you can use basic charts and graphs in this effort. Module 2 discusses value analysis, while Modules 3 and 4 cover normal variation and analyzing for capability. In Module 5, you discover the important topic of analyzing your own measurements, and Module 6 discusses how to glean insight just from watching a process in operation. Module 6 concludes this part by showing you how to measure the risk and confidence in your analysis decisions.

This course series provides more than an overview or survey of Six Sigma. It provides a comprehensive, actionable description of the methods and tools of Six Sigma. Yes, Six Sigma is rigorous, technical, and analytical. But this course series takes on this difficult subject and makes it understandable through examples, simple explanations, and visual aids.

This course is applicable to engineers of all disciplines working in any industry. Six Sigma is applicable everywhere — not only in large and complex corporations but also in the less complex and more intimate worlds of professional performance and personal accomplishment.

 

Specific Knowledge or Skill Obtained

This course teaches the following specific knowledge and skills:

• Understanding the power inherent in basic charts and graphs
• Creating and analyzing variation and distributions through histograms or dot plots
• Comparing distributions with box and whisker plots
• Exploring variable relationships with scatter plots
• Using process behavior charts to see true performance
• Analyzing customer satisfaction
• Pinpointing waste and its seven forms
• Building cause-and-effect matrices to analyze factors leading to value
• Using Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) to analyze for value
• Understanding the pervasiveness of bell-shaped, normally-distributed data
• Calculating probabilities by using the standard normal model
• Transforming real-world data to the standard normal model
• Verifying that your data are normal (or close enough)
• Dealing with measures of yield and defect rate
• Calculating and interpreting the sigma (Z) score of a process or characteristic
• Using short- and long-term capability indices (CP, CPK, PP, and PPK)
• Understanding variation that comes from the act of measuring
• Speaking the language of measurement system analysis
• Using audits, attribute studies, and gauge studies
• Separating the critical few performance influencers from the trivial many
• Using observational studies as a funneling tool
• Detecting root cause with multi-vari process observation
• Distinguishing populations and samples
• Surveying sampling distributions and the central limit theorem
• Establishing confidence intervals for population means, variances, and proportions

Certificate of Completion

You will be able to immediately print a certificate of completion after passing a multiple-choice quiz consisting of 30 questions. PDH credits are not awarded until the course is completed and quiz is passed.