Fortification of Six Sigma: expanding the DMAIC toolset
Six Sigma as a quality improvement framework cannot remain static if it is to sustain its value for businesses beyond the first waves of applications. This paper explores the possibilities of enhancing the usefulness and effectiveness of Six Sigma by the integration of established Operations Research/Management Science (OR/MS) techniques. In this paper, we elucidate the needs for OR/MS techniques to enhance Six Sigma deployment in operational and transactional environments and propose a new training roadmap for core Six Sigma professionals (Six Sigma Black Belts) which incorporates these techniques. A matrix relating the components of the proposed training curriculum to the actual deliverables during implementation for a hybrid of operational and transactional environments is also presented. A practical case study is also presented to demonstrate the usefulness of the OR/MS tools in a typical transactional environment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A new trend in home automation is to integrate audio en video applications. However in current domotics systems, these are usually conFigured statically. We implemented a home automation tool that dynamically (re)schedules bandwidth for different types of multimedia streams with different constraints toward latency and quality. The dynamic scheduling problem was implemented using distributed agents negotiating for bandwidth using the contract-net negotation protocol.