Black Belt

paflyer said:
Currently a senior consulting engineer (EE) in new product development; came across an interesting req for high-level QA mgr in mfg and it included LSS BB as a requirement. I have a lot of "informal" experience in process improvement, both in manufacturing and business processes.
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I will say that if you have process improvement experience on your resume and it looks like a good fit for us, we don't care if you have the BB, we will put you through the training.
 
nauga said:
I had a co-worker who referred to the fad-management process (Six Sigma, Lean, Lean+, TQM, TQL, BPR, MBWA, and all the other shiny buzzwords) as "Management by Airport Bookstore"

Nauga,
who calls it "all thrust, no vector"
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Oh man that's funny. Because it's true.

weilke said:
My 'Lean project' was a writeup of how many hundreds of thousands we were wasting every year by putting people without any product responsibility through a lean class during orientation. Someone told me I was a troublemaker.
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Or the only person who actually understood the course material. :)
 
I'm a no belt, have attended an all day Lean class, and completed all the company required online training (Maybe a dozen short courses). I've taken part in a few Kaizens. One was for DC-10 engine change. We observed, and documented the entire process, then devised ways to streamline the process. The spaghetti diagram, alone, was shocking. We knew there was waste, but no Idea of the actual amount. As a result, several engine change kits were developed that get wheeled out to the aircraft at the beginning of an engine change. We have made numerous similar improvements.
 
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Our training was done with two, one-week sessions which included 6-8hrs of classroom instruction per day, and one or two projects to demonstrate the application of Lean tools. Pareto/XBar charts, spaghetti diagrams, process/value-stream mapping, Load balancing, etc. It was fairly intense in terms of workload, but as with anything else, if you don't keep using those tools in your day-to-day job, you quickly lose a lot of it.
 
GlennAB1 said:
I'm a no belt, have attended an all day Lean class, and completed all the company required online training (Maybe a dozen short courses). I've taken part in a few Kaizens. One was for DC-10 engine change. We observed, and documented the entire process, then devised ways to streamline the process. The spaghetti diagram, alone, was shocking. We knew there was waste, but no Idea of the actual amount. As a result, several engine change kits were developed that get wheeled out to the aircraft at the beginning of an engine change. We have made numerous similar improvements.
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That seems to be the value of these buzzword things. Adding motivation to do what should have been figured out by the people doing the work years before anyone said "Kaizen" but they weren't incentivized properly to find better ways to do their job.
 
denverpilot said:
That seems to be the value of these buzzword things. Adding motivation to do what should have been figured out by the people doing the work years before anyone said "Kaizen" but they weren't incentivized properly to find better ways to do their job.
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Management probably viewed devoting the time and manpower to determine whether there would be sufficent value added to justify change, was wasteful in itself. The order to proceed with such evaluation needed to come from the top.
 
GlennAB1 said:
Management probably viewed devoting the time and manpower to determine whether there would be sufficent value added to justify change, was wasteful in itself. The order to proceed with such evaluation needed to come from the top.
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Perhaps. Or perhaps people are just naturally lazy and more than willing to use the excuse "this is the way we've always done it" and not look for efficiencies on their own.
 
denverpilot said:
Perhaps. Or perhaps people are just naturally lazy and more than willing to use the excuse "this is the way we've always done it" and not look for efficiencies on their own.
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Could be human nature. The changes we've made have actually increased our workload, by returning aircraft to service sooner, allowing for more aircraft to be done inhouse which reduced vendor costs. It was really frowned upon by the average hourly employee until they realized it created job security.
 
GlennAB1 said:
Could be human nature. The changes we've made have actually increased our workload, by returning aircraft to service sooner, allowing for more aircraft to be done inhouse which reduced vendor costs. It was really frowned upon by the average hourly employee until they realized it created job security.
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It usually is. I have a hell of a time teaching young sysadmins that they should automate stuff they do all the time so they can focus on things that make or save the company real money.
 
denverpilot said:
That seems to be the value of these buzzword things. Adding motivation to do what should have been figured out by the people doing the work years before anyone said "Kaizen" but they weren't incentivized properly to find better ways to do their job.
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LOL. True to an extent. I worked at an airline and a few of us had made numerous suggestions for improvements over several years and were ignored. Then the company brough in some outside consultants / efficiency experts. These folks observed our operations and asked us for our thoughts and suggestions. Many of our previously ignored ideas all of a sudden had value when these outside "experts" then suggested them to management. But hey, I guess they had the right colored belts. LMFAO.
 
SkyDog58 said:
LOL. True to an extent. I worked at an airline and a few of us had made numerous suggestions for improvements over several years and were ignored. Then the company brough in some outside consultants / efficiency experts. These folks observed our operations and asked us for our thoughts and suggestions. Many of our previously ignored ideas all of a sudden had value when these outside "experts" then suggested them to management. But hey, I guess they had the right colored belts. LMFAO.
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That is the essence of the consultancy business.
  1. Take what the business feeds you...
  2. Re-word it with cool trendy buzzwords and put it in a nice .ppt deck
  3. Regurgitate it to management...Collect your $$$:p
 
GlennAB1 said:
When they are paying big money for consultation, they somehow feel inclined to listen.
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Wonder how much the airlines that have died paid for consultants before they went bankrupt? :)

Didn't TWA have something like 70+ vice-presidents before they folded? :)
 
Shopshirt said:
That is the essence of the consultancy business.
  1. Take what the business feeds you...
  2. Re-word it with cool trendy buzzwords and put it in a nice .ppt deck
  3. Regurgitate it to management...Collect your $$$:p
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Unfortunately there is a great amount of truth to that. :(

And a mentality that is one of the contributing factors to the US losing its competitive edge in a lot of industries. :mad:
 
GlennAB1 said:
TWA didn't fold, they were liquidated by a corporate raider, devaluing them, and making them ripe for merger.
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Same thing in the good ol' U.S.A.
Doesn't really matter what you call it when you lose your company name and the bosses are told to take a hike along with the employees.
Texaco ain't around anymore either.
 
GlennAB1 said:
TWA didn't fold, they were liquidated by a corporate raider, devaluing them, and making them ripe for merger.
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But that is usually only done when the individual parts are worth more than the whole. If a business is doing well, makes a profit, has goodwill, etc., then the value of the company should be greater than its hard assets. When the inverse is true and the stock price is low, that is when a raider will buy the company and sell off parts. It's good business sense in the mind of the vulture ... err.... raider .... errr .... capitalist.
 
SkyDog58 said:
But that is usually only done when the individual parts are worth more than the whole. If a business is doing well, makes a profit, has goodwill, etc., then the value of the company should be greater than its hard assets. When the inverse is true and the stock price is low, that is when a raider will buy the company and sell off parts. It's good business sense in the mind of the vulture ... err.... raider .... errr .... capitalist.
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It's more fun than that now. You can "invest" in the bonds hoping to cash in on the company being pieced out like it should have been (GM) and the government will step in and decide to pay you pennies on the dollar instead and deem the company "too big to fail".

Nobody has to really care anymore how badly they run a company, as long as it's big and they can scare some politicians with how massive the crash will be when it rolls over and sinks.
 
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