Jan 2007 Program

Wednesday, January 17, 2007
to be held at the
Sirloin Stockade
North West corner of McGalliard and Morrison Roads
Across the street from the Muncie Wal-Mart
4949 W Hessler Rd, Muncie, IN Phone:(765) 287-9051
Click here for direction to the Sirloin Stockade

Pre-Clinic	6:00 PM DMAIC - Improve Presenter: Allen Fuller
Dinner	6:30 PM (Pay restaurant cashier)
Agenda	Dinner Introductions Door Prize Drawing Section Business Introduction of Speaker
Speaker	7:30 PM "Ben Franklin and the Central Limits Theorem" Joe Adams Process Excellence Architect Strategic Quality 3611 Driftwood Dr S #102 Lafayette, IN 47905

Ben Franklin and the Central Limits Theorem,
A perspective to understanding process control and problem solving

How might one of Ben Franklin’s most famous sayings changed had he understood the Central Limits theorem? In this talk we will investigate how this fundamental concept of statistics has been applied and sometimes misapplied. We will also show through experiment how the central limit theorem functions and how it relates to several other SPC tools used for process control and problem solving.

Joe Adams has been a Process Excellence Architect with Strategic Quality, a Business System consulting firm, for the last 8 years. He aids organizations in Conceiving and in Achieving Excellence by helping them find and execute "The Right Things, The Right Way". Joe has over 30 years of business and management experience. He received his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Joe began his career at General Motor’s Technical Center before returning to Rose as a GM Scholar to earn his MSME degree. He then returned to GM’s Delco Remy Division where he had the privilege to learn problem solving from Art Bender, a founder of ASQ and contemporary of Edwards Deming. This talk on the Central Limits Theorem is just one Joe presents from his series on achieving excellence.

In addition to his current consulting position, Joe has been the President and CEO of an automotive and consumer products manufacturer, CPX / North Vernon, IN, and has held many managerial positions at Delco Remy / Anderson, IN. He developed the business and technical plans and led the team which grew Delco Remy’s sensor business from $5 million to $150 million annually in 5 years to become recognized as a global market leader. The sensor team’s lean manufacturing processes were recognized in 1996 by James P. Womak, TPS Guru and author of The Machine That Changed the World – The Toyota Production System, as "The best production system I have seen in the world." The sensor plant won a 2003 Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing.

Joe led a multi-national team which reduced scrap rates of a product which used 288,000 parts and assemblies per day from 40% to 0.05% in 3 months and achieved 0 PPM rates within 12 months. This team’s achievement won A.T. Kearney Consultants’ kaizen benchmark award. Joe provided the Six-Sigma tools/methods to a product line team that resulted in reducing warranty claims 60-fold in 6 months. He also guided a company who was recognized as having excellent business and quality systems into one perceived as having benchmark standards. A major Tier-1 Japanese automotive supplier is studying this company for their "Plant of the Future" after they recognized this company as a "Top Five" supplier in the world.

Pre-Clinic: The Fall 2006 Pre-clinics were a 3-part series on the Define, Measure, and Analyze steps in the Six-Sigma DMAIC process. This month Allen Fuller continues with Improve.

22 Quality Professionals were educated and entertained by Joe Adams. Joe demonstrated how averages tend to be Normally distributed. The sum of 12 random numbers will also be Normal.

Dan Opie won the Door Prize and selected the "Six-Sigma Demystified" book donated by Quality America.