Six Sigma Black Belt

Identify elements that enhance communication in your training session.

The Six Sigma team at a custom cabinetry manufacturer has just undertaken a new project. The team has identified an opportunity for improvement in its custom staircase design process. The team has developed a new process, but wants to use a pilot test before full-scale implementation.

Currently, the finishers spend a lot of time reaching, bending, and replenishing materials. A new process has been designed to reduce waste, making the whole process more efficient. The work space of the finishers has been redesigned to ensure tools and materials are within reach. A toolbox was added in the arm of the finishers' chairs. A kanban system has been implemented to alert floor supervisors when materials are low so that they can be restocked before the finishers need them. Workers with varying degrees of expertise and experience have been selected to participate in the pilot.

Members of the Six Sigma team are on site to watch, listen, and record details of what happens during the pilot testing. Carlos, one of the participants, can't find his screw drivers. Tracy, a Six Sigma team member, tells him to look in the tool holder, located in the armrest of his chair. Tracy records the incident and sticks around in case Carlos has any other trouble. Seeing that another participant needs help, Tracy moves on to find out what the problem is. This time, the participant just wants to tell Tracy what a good job she thinks the team has done designing the new process. However, she also has a recommendation about the toolbox located in the arm of the chair. Tracy takes detailed notes of participants' feedback, but she refrains from adding commentary of her own on the design of the new process.

What should Tracy have done to improve the way in which the pilot test was conducted?

Which descriptions exemplify the detrimental impact hidden factories can have on an organization?

Which are examples of variables that are well suited for SPC?

Which statements accurately describe long-term capability?

A team of surveyors is doing initial surveys to determine the location of proposed cell phone towers. After comparing some of the day's measurements to those calculated using a transit level, the team finds that the new mapping procedure is giving inaccurate results. Pressed for time, and in light of the recent actions by managers to sanction workers who say they need to retake measurements, the surveyors decide to let it slide, thinking they will get it right next time.

Of the six categories of error, which are represented in this scenario?

Which statements accurately describe the characteristics of Latin square designs?

You're working with a technical support helpline to help improve the process and increase customer satisfaction rates. You've identified technical support representative experience at the level of five years and customer contact mode being instant messaging as the two optimal settings for desired customer satisfaction levels of 95%.

You experiment to find out whether small variations in these levels will have a significant impact on customer satisfaction.

What is the objective of this experiment?

In an automobile assembly plant, safety signs are standardized and color coded according to the various types of hazards they represent.

What is the basic goal of this element of visual controls?

A roofing company has to build trusses with a 33.00 degree angle at the peak. An angle with a known accuracy of 33.000 degrees has been created as the standard. To test the accuracy of the measuring device, the standard angle is measured 12 times. The resolution of the device is 0.075 degrees. And the tolerance set for the process is +/- 0.010, giving a tolerance range of 0.02.

Which statement offers the correct values and interpretation of bias in this scenario? Round the value of bias to three decimal places.

Francis is a team leader who is struggling to keep her meeting focused and on time.

A crucial meeting is underway, and participants are discussing an important product trial that the company is undertaking. The meeting begins on time, but the team leader, Francis, unexpectedly finds that the cable to connect her laptop to the projector is missing. So, instead of displaying the agenda, Francis has to read it aloud to the team. No one has seen the items prior to the meeting, and it takes some time for the team to assimilate the information on the list.

When discussion begins, team members find it difficult to keep their place in the overall agenda that Francis read out. They keep returning to previous topics or anticipating future ones. Francis's original agenda provided for 10 minutes to discuss the pros and cons of each suggested action. But each action takes much longer to adequately discuss than Francis had hoped, and when the team concludes the discussion, Francis is surprised to find that the hour allocated to the meeting is nearly over. She has no option but to postpone a final decision until the next meeting. She summarizes the progress made in the past hour, itemizes all the action items and assignments for next week's meeting, and adjourns the meeting without a final decision.

What should Francis have done differently to manage her meeting more effectively? Identify the strategies that she did not apply.

Anton and his team at a city hospital have had a productive brainstorming session as they wrestle with the problem of why some departments have better access time for patients than others. Anton knows that their list of ideas will need to be grouped into related areas and then the team will have to determine which of those areas are having the most impact on the departments.

Which two tools could Anton use to facilitate this?

The responsibilities for Lean Six Sigma Black Belt training are varied.

What are a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt's training responsibilities?

Which elements enhance communication in your training session?

Which four statements describe how leading and lagging indicators are connected to organizational goals and strategies?

Monty works for a large software publishing company on the East Coast. Recently, the company merged with a small reference book company in California, whose employees will work on converting the books to a compatible electronic format and then will continue to do what they do so well, which is to acquire and publish new reference books. Monty is in charge of integrating the new company and its products into the existing library, which will take input from Programming, Research and Development, Quality Assurance, and HR.

What is the best team model for Monty's situation?

A large hotel chain is kicking off a continuous process initiative that has two objectives: eliminate waste and increase speed in the guest services division, and eliminate variation in the IT division. The executive board is aiming at world-class hotel status and is prepared to make an extensive time and financial commitment to the initiative.

Which statement proposes the best approach for this organization?

Identify the statements that correctly describe benchmarking.

A Six Sigma team at an Internet radio company is working to identify future opportunities for improvement and has decided to perform a scenario planning activity to identify possible futures. The team working on the scenario planning activity has established and agreed on the present environment the company faces.

Traditional forecasting indicates that Internet radio usage will continue to grow. Using a PEST analysis, the team explored uncertain variables and, among other variables, found that looming regulation may jeopardize its very existence. Using this analysis, the team groups similar factors.

Based on best practice, what other activities should the team do to complete its scenario planning?

What are goals of robust design?

Like all designs, the Latin square design has specific characteristics. What are they?

Select the statement that best summarizes the benefit of a postmortem in a Six Sigma project.

Identify five examples of theory-based motivational techniques applied in organizations.

Which statements best describe how benchmarking can enhance a Six Sigma project?

The enterprise leadership team at a national hotel chain is assessing potential roadblocks to Six Sigma deployment in the company by performing a roadblock analysis.

Access the Hotel Chain Roadblock Analysis for the results of the analysis, then identify statements that accurately categorize the potential roadblocks identified.

Which statement reflects the best strategy for ongoing evaluation?

The Six Sigma Black Belt at a major airline is analyzing the passenger processing time at seven of the airline's economy class counters at an airport. She wants to know if the processing time is within control at all times on a given day. The staff at these counters have a similar level of expertise, use the same infrastructure and software, and handle passengers for the same flight at a time.

Which option describes the best choice for a rational subgroup?

A virtual team is facing challenges due to constricted download bandwidth over satellite transmissions. And even when data reaches recipients in a timely fashion, the acronyms some members use are confusing. There's excessive competition between certain members as well.

What are appropriate suggestions for dealing with these symptoms of team challenges?

A Six Sigma team wants to improve the durability of lenses for a manufacturer of sunglasses. Investigation has indicated that two factors – the thickness of scratch-resistant coating and the type of lens – have the greatest impact on lens durability. The team decides to test each factor at two levels. A randomized experiment with four runs involving all possible combinations of factors and levels has been planned.

Will this meet the team's resolution needs, and why or why not?

Which four employee motivators examples are examples of theory-based techniques?

You're examining the PCE of the manufacturing process for an electronics firm. The sum of work that a customer would recognize as necessary to create the top-of-the-line model DVD player is 6 minutes and the process takes a total of 18 minutes on average. In this case, what is the PCE?

Express your answer as a percentage, rounded to the nearest whole number.

What conditions should exist in order to recommend the use of a randomized block design?

Which statement best summarizes the benefit of a postmortem in a Six Sigma project?

If event A – the probability of buying a new car – is .6 and event B – the probability of buying a motorcycle – is .3, what is the probability of buying either of the vehicles? The buyer must buy at least one item and the events are mutually exclusive.

In a Six Sigma team, members have great respect for each other and are always available to help one another with problems. But lately there have been some arguments about the next step in the project, and there have been a number of internal disagreements. This confusion is exacerbated by a few members with poor speaking skills, since it can take lengthy questioning to discover what they mean.

Which critical success factors need improvement in this team scenario?

What are statements that accurately describe nonparametric tests?

Identify statements that define nonparametric tests.

How is gap analysis used in Six Sigma?

Group challenges and interpersonal difficulties interrupt the positive flow of a meeting.

How should a team leader deal with groupthink or risky-shift forms of maladaptive behavior?

As the Design for Six Sigma methodology evolves, there are many variations in how DFSS is achieved and a variety of tools in use. Identify which tools and approaches are part of the DFSS methodology.

You're leading a Six Sigma team in an examination of a clothing manufacturer's production line. Management at the company wants to improve the process and increase output to a desired level. An early experiment determined four factors to be significant: employee experience, pattern cutting precision, sewing machine uptime, and fabric density.

Now you've completed another experiment, and concluded that sewing machine uptime and fabric density should be set at 97% and 1.82 respectively to achieve the desired response of 620 units per day.

Identify the objective of the latest experiment.

Identify statements that describe how the balanced scorecard approach helps align projects with organizational goals.

Which objectives can be accomplished though using strategic planning in Lean Six Sigma?

Lately, the industrial tooling plaster used during a design process has been slow to set. Interested in reducing set time, a team of engineers agrees that mixing speed, mixing time, water temperature, and plaster age have the greatest impact on set time. Each factor has two levels. The team plans a randomized experiment with eight runs.

Will this meet design requirements for the experiment, and why or why not?

What statements correctly describe goals and features of total productive maintenance (TPM) as implemented in an organization?

A grocery store is interested in determining measurement correlation among the scales at each of its check-out counters in one store. It's imperative that the price charged for weighed items is the same. An employee weighs a variety of objects on each scale and compares measurements. Data generated from each scale is used to calculate a percent agreement value of 30%.

What does this percent agreement value tell the chain about measurement correlation and the measurements derived from the scales?

Frank, a team leader, and his team are having a good problem-solving meeting. They've had a very productive brainstorming session that has produced a detailed breakdown of the different aspects of the complex problem they're looking at. The next step is to determine if there are causal links between the components of the problem, and if so, to rank them in order of importance.

Which tool should Frank and his team use to accomplish this?

Identify examples of variables that are well suited for SPC.

You are conducting a study on pain reliever dosage and pain levels in patients with chronic back strain. You take a sample of 20 patients and find a resulting p-value of 0.01.

What does this test result imply about statistical and practical significance?

A retail bank wants to determine the joint probability for two key continuous process variables in auto loan application processing – the experience of the processing agent, and the loan amount. Both variables are continuous, and a correlation study reveals that they are poorly correlated. Which distribution is the best for this data?

Last month, a candy manufacturer introduced four different new chocolate bars – the sales distributions of which were recorded. A team has tracked sales so far this month, and conducted a goodness-of-fit test to find out if the distribution has changed since last month. Review the details in the picture.

Was the test calculated and interpreted correctly?

Kevin, Suzy, and Nathan are stakeholders in a Six Sigma project in their organization. Kevin provides the team with expert advice in statistical measurement tools. Suzy, who has been coached by Kevin, is the lead project manager on a full-time basis. Nathan is responsible for confirming that any changes made by the project are beneficial.

Which statement most accurately describes each member's Six Sigma role?

Which descriptions best exemplify how Hoshin Kanri is applied in Six Sigma strategic planning?

Select the four characteristics of CTx requirements.

What is the ROI percentage for the year, expressed as a percentage, for this particular project? Round your answer to one decimal place.

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