E-Book Overview
Finding the Invisible Low-Hanging FruitWhen I first got into quality improvement in 1990, I frequently heard consultants speak about “low-hanging fruit” just waiting to be picked. Two years later and thousands of staff hours later, I stillhadn’t found any low-hanging fruit. Over the last two decades, I have heard from hundreds ofcustomers whose companies implemented Six Sigma only to have similar dismal results.In any company, if there really is low-hanging fruit, it’s usually visible everywhere from thefactory floor or nursing unit to the management conference room. When it’s that visible, anyone canpick it with a little common sense and a bit of trial and error.This is why there is no visible low-hanging fruit. Somebody has already picked it! And this iswhat stops most leaders from even considering the tools of breakthrough improvement—they can’tsee any more fruit to be picked. And, because they can’t see it, they come to believe that theirproblems are unsolvable, so they stop looking.In company after company, though, my own included, I have found orchards filled with invisiblelow-hanging fruit. You just can’t see it with the naked eye.You can, however, discern it through the magnifying lens of Excel PivotTables and charts. Theymake the seemingly invisible visible. They are the microscope, the MRI, the EKG of businessdiagnosis.When Louis Pasteur said that there were tiny bugs in the air and water, everyone thought he wascrazy because they weren’t visible ... to the naked eye. Everyone thought it was just an “ill wind” thatmade people sick.In today’s tough economic times, everyone laments about how hard it is, how an “ill wind” hasblown through their business, their industry, their economy. But have they considered using themodern tools of business medicine to root out the infectious agents in their business? Have they takenthe time to look for the invisible low-hanging fruit in their businesses? I doubt it.Someone sent me an e-mail the other day that said that even in the poorest run companies, he’d hadno luck finding the low-hanging fruit. But in every company I’ve ever worked with, I’ve foundmillions of dollars just waiting to be retrieved from the orchards of delay, defects, and deviation—thethree silent killers of productivity and profitability.Are you looking for the obvious? Or investigating the invisible?The low-hanging fruit is always invisible to the naked eye. Turn the magnifying and illuminatingtools of the QI Macros and Excel on your most difficult operational problems and stare into thedepths of the unknown, the unfamiliar. You’ll invariably find bushels of bucks, just waiting for avigilant harvester
E-Book Content
About the Author Jay Arthur teaches people how to eliminate the three silent killers of productivity and profitability— delay, defects, and deviation—using the Magnificent Seven Tools of Lean Six Sigma. He excels at using the 4 percent of knowledge and tools that deliver over 50 percent of results. He has helped companies from health care to manufacturing save millions of dollars. He has found that using QI Macros and Microsoft Excel can help solve seemingly impossible problems quickly and easily. Mr. Arthur is the author of Lean Six Sigma Demystified (McGraw-Hill) and six other books on Lean and Six Sigma. He is also the creator of QI Macros for Excel, an add-in that leverages the power of Excel to draw all of the charts and graphs needed for breakthrough improvement.
Copyright © 2014 by McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-0-07-182212-1 MHID:
0-07-182212-7
The material in this eBook also appears in the print