My First Blog Post

Create Constancy of Purpose for Improvement

Dr.W.Edwards Demming

Today 16^th July 2019 at 11:00 AM I was just looking at my mail box and received a mail from ASQ , I read it  and along with my heart beats going faster, Voila I Cracked the Six Sigma Black Belt Exam.

This is great feeling. It’s time to celebrate. One month of relentless hard work and result is in front of me.

Here is my story how I became “Certified Six Sigma Black Belt from ASQ”

I heard the word Six Sigma for the first time when I was attending a meeting of cross functional teams and one of the quality personal from our team demonstrated SPC chart and used the word “Six Sigma”.

The name of the person was Mr. Bikas Saha.  I was curious to know more about these two words Six & Sigma and on the top of that I was wondering how this quality person know the short comings in my functional area without being part of it, I am working on the shop floor day in and day out and this person is just analyzing some data and giving me inputs to improve upon.

I started interacting with Mr. Bikas more and more to know the application of the methodology.

I come to know that these are simple statistical calculations through which he is doing wonders for the organization so this increased my curiosity on the subject.

After seeing my keen interest in the methodology he suggested me to pursue Green Belt from Indian Statistical Institute (ISI)

Then I attended three day training program at Delhi from ISI and I got good understanding on the basic concepts, I felt competent and I was joyful imbibing these concepts and it was a great moment that I was Certified Green Belt now.

Then I tried some hands on few projects on shop floor to get practical understanding of the concepts.

During one of my projects I was doing some validation studies which includes optimizing the Low and High levels of some factor  but  I was wondering how to do that as this thing I did not know.

I consulted Mr. Bikas again and he said “my dear friend it is a continuous improvement process of gaining knowledge on this methodology  now you have to gain concepts on DOE and hypothesis testing etc. “ these wordings from him triggered me to become Black Belt.

Then time passed and I joined Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. I met with Mr. Vinod and I got opportunity to work with him on some Black Belt Project in QC Labs. He was already Certified Black Belt.

He guided me on Statistical Software “Minitab”. Unfortunately Mr. Vinod left the organization to work on new project outside the company. I was deeply moved by this decision of Mr.  Vinod.

Then I met Mr. Aresh Bhatnagar one of Mr. Vinod’s Team mate who was already certified six sigma black belt from American Society of Quality.  I have shown my keen interest in becoming Black Belt though I have gained some knowledge on the subject by this time. He emphasized me to get certified from ASQ.

As ASQ is one of the best certification internationally in the field of Quality and it is well recognized throughout the world.

I explored ASQ website and registered there and applied for Six Sigma Black Belt Certification.

Aresh told me about going through Body of Knowledge (BOK) thoroughly and suggested some basic books like Statistics for Management, The certified Six Sigma Black Belt Hand Book by T.M Kubiak and Donald W Benbow, Question Bank by Sreedhar Kadambi and he suggested me to refer Khan Academy to learn Statistics where I achieved the level 3 in statistical knowledge and it was eye opening resource for me.

I explored few resources on my own. For DOE I referred “Pharmaceutical Quality by Design a practical approach by Walkiria S. Schlindwein & Mark Gibson.

I explored lots of website questionnaires. I spent 8 to 9 hrs. Daily for a month to gain confidence that I will be able to crack the exam and solved lots of questions on internet.