Breakthrough Improvement with QI Macros and Excel

Finding the Invisible Low-Hanging FruitWhen I first got into quality improvement in 1990, I frequently heard consultants speak about “low-hanging fruitâ€‌ 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 windâ€‌ thatmade people sick.
In today’s tough economic times, everyone laments about how hard it is, how an “ill windâ€‌ 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.