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Blank Paper International Blog
Certification – What’s happening to our standards?
Today we want to discuss Six Sigma certification and the decaying of certification standards, an understanding of our journey to becoming Master Black Belts will help. I started out being trained as a Black belt in the first wave of Black belts trained outside of...
Case Study 2: 13% Increase in Cell Phone Production Throughput
This week we decided we should have a look at another case study. In this case a European Cell Phone Manufacturer/Assembler with manufacturing plants in China. This Cell Phone manufacturer assembled cell phones for one of a leading global cell phone brands. In this...
5 Steps to complete a Process Analysis
Process Analysis is one of the key areas to making significant improvements in any process. Process Analysis can take various different forms however we’ll start at the beginning. When ever we start a Business Improvement Project there is always a process involved....
How quickly can you really get improvements?
We are often asked, how quickly can we achieve some improvements? In this day and age everyone wants to make improvements straight away. It’s understandable to want to get results right away however you need to remember that a process has not suddenly started...
5 Steps to Effectively Graphically Analyse Your Data
Businesses collect data. If your business is like most businesses you have a lot of data, and only a small proportion of the data is used in a meaningful way. However it is not uncommon to find that the data required for a Business Improvement Project does not exist....
Q&A: Centralised versus Decentralised?
When working on Business Improvement Deployments with larger clients we are almost always asked “Should our Business Improvement team have a centralised or a decentralised structure?” The answer is “it depends”. First lets take a look at what we mean by the two...
2 Reasons You May be Making Decisions Based on Faulty Data
Business runs on data. In fact most companies have too much data. They collect a lot of data that’s not needed, and the data that is used contains errors. This data is usually used to calculate averages and long term trends i.e: average output of a shift, average...
4 Principles to help you to increase Process Flow; resulting in reduced cycle times, increased productivity and reducing costs
We've been involved in many improvement projects which generally can be categorised into the following objectives: Increasing throughput Reducing cycle times Increasing productivity (doing more with less) Increasing availability (outside of this article) Reducing...
Case Study: 25% increased Throughput using TOC and Designed Experiments
An underground mining operation had been struggling with their Six Sigma program. The program had been underway for about 12 months and for various reasons had struggled to gain traction. 12 projects had been selected and were progressing at various paces. In mining,...
Q&A: How would you get started if you needed quick results?
We are often asked how to get started with making improvements. We have all been in the situation where we are not getting the results needed and we need to be seen to be do something let alone actually getting improved results? We will talk about what our experience...
Q&A: What are the key elements for a successful deployment?
We were asked the following question by a client recently: “What are the key elements we need to consider in starting a Business Improvement Program” There is a ‘recipe’ that we use to guide any new Business Improvement initiative or when we are starting out with any...
A ‘Goal Tree’ case study: Improving throughput for a Dispatching Operation
In the last blog post we discussed the Goal Tree. The Goal tree has become one of the critical tools that we use to help make rapid improvements. The Goal tree is not traditionally in the Six Sigma Body of Knowledge but has been part of the Theory of Constraints...
The One Tool the “Business Improvement” Professional should have in their Arsenal.
We would like to move to a more technical article. We would like to discuss a tool that has become integral to generating results on our Business Improvement Projects. While this tool has become critical in helping provide clarity and direction to our improvement...
Q&A: How many Black Belts do I need?
We are often asked this question, so thought we should address it here. Traditionally in a Six Sigma deployment the number that has been used is 2% of the workforce, that is 2% of the workforce should be Black Belts. That is 2 Black Belts per 100 staff. This 2% number...
Just get Started?
Tough times ahead? What’s the choice for companies in terms of where to go from here with their existing Business Improvement programs? Scale it down like a number of companies we know, ramp it up, or maintain the status quo. In fact those very same...
Q&A: First 5 questions you should be asking
Results below Expectations? What are the first 5 Questions you should be asking? We are frequently asked to help a client whose results are not up to expectations. They may have an existing business improvement program or even no business improvement program....
Remove Constraints Maximise Flow
We are advocates for using Theory of Constraints, Lean and Six Sigma on our projects. We are methodology agnostic and believe that all three methodologies have a place at the appropriate time. To generate productivity gains there are a number of key elements that must...
Productivity Gains are Vital
On 25 August, 2013, CEO of BHP Billiton Andrew Mackenzie stated, “Growth for us, and growth for anybody, is growth in free cash flow and you can grow free cash flow in two ways: add more productive capacity by investing (and) you buy businesses by investing, or...
What’s Your Problem?
Our middle manager is running a small but enthusiastic team of office workers. Our manager is armed with plenty of experience and enthusiasm but he's got a problem, an ongoing problem? One that the manager had thought would go away or correct itself with time. The...