Six Sigma for Service and Healthcare Industries
The benefits of using Six Sigma in a production and manufacturing environment to reduce and eliminate defects are well known and documented. However, this powerful methodology is effective in any environment where there are numerous hand-offs, transactions, highly variable results and complex processes. In this course, you’ll integrate Six Sigma and Lean techniques to drive process improvement. Service industries such as banking, insurance, telecomm, healthcare, IT and any company with a highly integrated customer relationship or complex flows of information can reap enormous cost savings, quality improvements and increased customer effectiveness through the deployment of Six Sigma.
You’ll learn to:
- Focus on removing the idle time, wait time or “white space” that plagues transactional activities between processes
- Understand why variability is inherently greater in service industries and how it can create process improvement failures
- Understand why customer-focused, time-based metrics lead to increased speed, quality and lower error rates
- Manage capacity and, in doing so, decrease wait times and errors within the process
- Optimize batch sizes for service-based transactions
- Create customer-focused process maps based on product families
- Build value stream maps that identify wastes and inefficiencies
- Leverage the relationships between lead time, cycle time and value-creating time
- Identify and reduce hidden wastes in processes
- Understand why inspection can’t reduce process errors to a satisfactory level and how to remove it from all but regulatory-required activities
- Recognize different types of wait line problems and apply spreadsheet models to understand and remove their root causes
- Use wait time models to optimize staff levels, resource allocation and customer satisfaction
- Manage bottlenecks, buffers and the slowest activities in a process
“I believe every hospital administrator should attend this course.”
Kathy Moseley, Middleton Memorial Veteran Hospital, Madison WI
“Six Sigma is a discipline that will have a great impact in problem management.”
George Pleimling, American Family Insurance, Madison, WI
The University of Wisconsin–Madison, as a member of the University Continuing Education Association (UCEA), authorizes this course for 1.4 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) or 14 hours, as well as 14 PDUs.
jcorkery@exed.wisc.edu