Marshall Atkinson Alright, so here's the first question. Let's begin with exactly what a Black Belt in Six Sigma even means. This isn't some sort of crazy martial arts discipline, is it? What does it mean? And what are you doing? Ali Banholzer It is a little misleading. And I really saw it in action. I, really had no idea -- I'd heard of it before, but I really had no idea. And you're right, it has nothing to do with martial arts although I do have a martial arts background as well. But yeah, this has nothing to do with that. And Lean Six Sigma is kind of the culmination of two different practices in the early 1900s. Toyota started developing Lean Manufacturing, and that was doing leaning down manufacturing processes to the point that they were only doing what was value-added or what the customer was willing to pay for, and added value to the process. And that really changed manufacturing. Then in the 80s, Motorola came out with Six Sigma. And Six Sigma was about quality control, and just-in-time manufacturing, and not having waste, and all of these concepts. And then in the early 2000s, they got combined into one line of thought and expanded to healthcare and service organizations and outside of manufacturing. So Lean Six Sigma is all about efficient quality production of any business process. Marshall Atkinson All right, well, that sums it up pretty well. It sounds like to me, you're doing some sort of analysis, you're recording data, you're looking at your business through an overview. Am I right about that? Ali Banholzer Absolutely. So the acronym for Lean Six Sigma is DMAIC. And it’s defined, measure, analyze, improve, and control. And of course, there's a methodology for doing all of that. But, in doing data analysis -- measuring is a significant part of it. And so, measuring is the M and then analyzing that data, coming up with the improvements, and then implementing them. There are 15 tollgates that you go through. A Lean Six Sigma project is about a six-month project with a team of experts; either internally that you've trained, or if you're a very large organization, you could bring in someone like me with a Black Belt to do it for you. But you have some training done to train employees and train those people that are going to do it to help you measure and meet those tollgates and it's very methodical. Marshall Atkinson So somebody's sitting there right now and going: "Wow, that sounds like a lot of work. Is it worth it? I don't know if I want to do all that measuring." What do you say to those people? Ali Banholzer I would say, for any small business, you can do a part of or all of Lean Six Sigma, depending on how far you wanted to dive into it. And, there are so many good practices in each of those five steps that you can implement to help improve your business that I would say, just start, measure, collect some data, and make some improvements. And I know that we're going to dive into that a little bit more. So I don't want to get too long-winded. But what I would say is overall, the concept behind it is continual process improvement from the bottom up from your employees. It's not top-down, it's not the owner dictating, it's establishing, defining a problem as generated by your employees. Meaning it's their idea to fix it, of course, you're going to lead them there, you're going to guide them. But their idea and through that process, you're going to demonstrate to them how it's going to make their job easier said you're going to have the buy-in and they're going to want to keep doing it.
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