As a junior in college while studying Supply Chain Management I began growing an interest in operations management. As a facet of operations management I started learning about Lean and Six Sigma.

For those who do not know, in a sentence, Lean and Six Sigma are two continuous improvement methodologies used by businesses to improve operations.

Lean = eliminate waste and optimize flow;

Six Sigma = eliminate variation and defects.

During the summer between Junior and Senior year in college, I interned at Honeywell Aerospace, a company that happens to be well known for their broad and deep use of Lean and Six Sigma. Naturally I found myself networking with the Lean Six Sigma folks and spearheaded an effort to earn my Greenbelt certification.  I was successful in attending the classroom training and showing proficient use of the requisite tools such as Value Stream Mapping, SIPOC, VOC, FMEA, and Time Studies leading to the certification at the end of the summer.

Looking to parlay my Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt into a differentiation amongst my peers in my senior year job search for post graduation I found another internship during the school year focused exclusively on Lean Six Sigma implementation with Goodrich Aerospace. Finally, I made a connection with the founder of iSixSigma.com and was asked to write in their Blog community – the iSixSigma.com Blogosphere.

In fact, it was through the iSixSigma.com job boards that I found my first job out of school with Carpedia Intl.

As an operations management consultant with Carpedia and more recently as an independent consultant, I practiced implementing Lean, Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints, and other continuous improvement (CI) methodologies for a wide array of businesses.

While I am officially only certified as a Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt, I’ve trained numerous Black Belts, and have been told that the scale and results of my projects borderline Master Black Belt.

Here are some of the projects that I have worked on and the CI tools that I have implemented:

• Hong Kong Financial Services Operations – Eliminated Non-Value Adding activities, implemented Standard Operating Procedures, implemented Visual Management Systems
• New Jersey Medical Device Purchasing Group – Optimized inventory safety stock levels, implemented economic order quantity, improved Sales Inventory Operations Planning (SIOP) process
• Connecticut Regional Hospital – Implemented lean patient flow, began daily schedule review meetings, eliminated bed assignment process delays, implemented kan ban like variance action system
• California Winery Bottling Factory – Trained staff on Theory of Constraints and immediate variance corrective action, implemented Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED), completed parts room 5S, implemented Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) tracking
• Las Vegas Hotel / Casino Food & Beverage Department – Implemented just in time staff scheduling, completed kitchen 5S event, balanced staff role workload
• Winnipeg Heavy Equipment Manufacturer – Optimized paint line constraint throughput, redesigned factory floor layout to eliminate wasted motion

I worked on these projects for 4-8 months each, resulting in validated annual savings of $1.3MM on average.

I look forward to my next role where I can continue to leverage these continuous improvement skills in a full time position so that I can better see the lasting results and effects of these business improvements.

As can be seen in the lack of posts here for the last while, I have been lax on managing my “online presence,” and again I find myself disappointed in others with my name.

If you are looking for me – the Rick Maher applying for strategy / continuous improvement jobs right about now, I can be found at the following:

• LinkedIn – Rick Maher
• Facebook – Rick Maher
• Personal Blog – RickMaher.com
• iSixSigma.com Blogger page – (old, but me)

I hope that, whether you know me already or not, you won’t hold it against me that other Rick Mahers (NOT me) like to hunt:

Or yet another (not me) that likes to fish:

However, I did referee soccer for 8 years, including this picture – which IS me and can be found online – from a tournament in Hawaii in 2003 (I am on the far right).

Hopefully that clears a few things up! Thanks for stopping by!

Out of nowhere today I found myself in the first black and white moral dilemma of my life. I was alerted that my name was being considered for a position at the company where I am currently consulting.
My employment agreement is very clear – I am not to take a job in any capacity with a client of my employer for at least 6 months after the end of my employment.

The letter of agreement that my employer presents to any potential client is also very clear – to proceed with a project, both parties agree not to hire any employee from each other for at least six months following the end of the project.

My first reaction was flattery – I was flattered that my work thus far has been worthy of interest for a full time position on what I perceive to be a fairly prestigious team of my client’s.

Then came the guilt. One of the primary reasons for my company insisting upon a non-compete agreement with each employee as well as each client is because my company does not want every client to abandon the potential of purchasing services through hiring consultants on full time.

So, how did I respond?

I immediately thanked the client who let me know that I was ‘talked about’ as he put it. He definitely noticed my discomfort and put the silver dagger in the situation saying, ‘and no-one has to know about it at this point.’

At that point I briefly mentioned the non-compete agreement and politely changed the subject.

Next question, do I leave the opportunity open for myself and keep it between the client and myself or alert my manager and risk humiliating the client for trying to circumvent the non-compete?

I decided to alert my manager – my whole team for that matter. I’m confident it was the right decision, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least a bit worried about the potential trust I may lose from the client as I assume the issue will be addressed over the next few days.

Inspired by a recent article in the magazine BestLife I decided I better get back to blogging.  The article specifically mentioned blogging as a means to improving one’s ‘Google image’ or the results returned when a potential employer runs your name on a search engine.  That was precisely the reason I started this blog.

However, that reason has never been the reason for actually maintaining it (as can be seen in my lengthy intermissions).

I have always liked exploring my ‘professional side.’  And on that front, nothing has changed.

I am now 10 months into my job with the Operations Consulting firm previously mentioned, and loving it as much as ever. As of January 1, 2007 I was given a promotion, from ‘Consultant’ to ‘Analysis Manager’.  The new role is quite a bit different in that instead of working on projects (developing, installing, and building sustainable operational improvement changes), I am now on a small (7 people) team that does the pre-project scoping and the final steps of the project sales process.

Anyone who has interviewed or considered interviewing for a management consultant job has read the questions like ‘how many phonebooths are there in NY City?’ or ‘How many white dishwashers were sold in North America last year?’

Well, my job is basically to ask those types of questions in terms of our potential clients, then determine the answers. In one weeks time, the Analysis team evaluates a business’s operational execution, determines the opportunity in terms of increased throughput, increased capacity utilization, decreased overhead, etc. then correlates that opportunity to an improvement to the company’s bottom line. From there we communicate to the President or Owner of the company the opportunity we found, the correlation of capturing a portion of that opportunity to the bottom line, and a rough outline of how the project team would go about achieving that opportunity capture.

It’s all pretty interesting stuff I think.  Even if I do typically work in the range of 80hrs per week.

You can probably imagine that is why this post is so helter skelter and hereby being cut-off.

More to come for sure.

Thanks for dropping by. Many of you probably already can tell that this is just a cool WP Theme (thanks Phu).

But, the content is king here – be sure to check out a few of my most popular posts:

1. How To: Compare Job Offers
2. How To: Negotiate Salary Out Of College
3. How To: Accept and Decline Job Offers

This site is definitely still young and growing, so leave a quick comment and tell me what you think it needs!

Thanks for reading!