Six Sigma Meets AI: Drinking the Ocean with a Teaspoon

Ever think about airplanes? Speed, in-flight entertainment, that mild panic while clear air turbulence jostles you awake from your nap… but let’s be real here – paper records probably aren’t what come to mind.

?? Surprise! Behind the scenes of that shiny plane, there’s a mountain of handwritten invoices from maintenance shops worldwide. In a world of digital twins, we’re still swimming in manual data entry, cluttered with fat-finger typos. Each shop’s got its own system (or lack thereof), and if you’re guessing this creates a lot of “opportunity for improvement,” well, you’re right.

?? The Problem: Bringing Six Sigma into this mess was like drinking the ocean with a teaspoon. Data was 100% correct unless it was wrong, audits were perfect… until they weren’t. With boxes of invoices hidden in every closet from Tokyo to Toledo, no 富士通 OCR or even Minitab could make sense of it. DMAIC was more “define, measure, anguish, infuriate, cry.”

?? The Solution: Enter “AI” (more advanced pattern recognition, less OpenAI ). We built a system to flag anomalies by spotting data patterns that didn’t quite fit. From there, it identified the offending shop, flagging their invoices to be sent through a second layer of review. This simple pattern-recognition tool helped us zero in on problem areas – and as a bonus, saved us a whopping 80% in overhead costs and cut down audit findings by 63%.

??? Why It Works: Instead of drowning in every piece of paper, AI narrows the focus to where Six Sigma magic actually works. By recognizing patterns and outliers, we transformed an impossible data ocean into a manageable puddle. At which time we were able to come up with a whole series of black belt projects to run with.

?? Where Do You Think AI Can Help in Your Six Sigma Journey? Are there any legacy processes still holding your team back? Where else could AI do the heavy lifting?

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