Apr

Six Sigma Software

By admin

As some of you may know from reading this blog, I have a green belt in the Six Sigma process improvement method and am a big fan of its benefits. Recently Cary Harwin of Catalyst Development reached out to me about their new product, ChoiceAnalyst, which is a decision support tool for Six Sigma. You can find more about it here, and the pricing and support fees are listed here. There’s a personal edition that handles one decision maker, and a standard version that can handle up to five decision makers. Cary also plans on rolling out an enterprise version that will include collaboration features.

If you are not familiar with Six Sigma, here’s a quick primer. Six Sigma uses a rigorous, scientific approach to figuring out why a problem occurs when the cause is not obvious. The process requires you to define the problem, measure it, analyze your measurements, improve the process that was causing the problem to prevent it from happening, and control the process so that the problem’s causes don’t crop up again in the future.

Cary was kind enough to talk with us today and provide the following interview, which I think you’ll find useful in getting a better sense of whether decision tool software such as ChoiceAnalyst can be helpful to you.

Why did you develop ChoiceAnalyst?

“In sorting through decisions involving multiple criteria with many alternatives, people are becoming much more comfortable with using tools to assist in those kinds of decisions. People often struggle with how to interpret multiple criteria in making a decision, and ChoiceAnalyst makes this much easier by automatically weighting criteria based on your rankings, presenting each criteria as a choice, and allowing you to then make an informed decision. It’s very difficult for an individual to hold several different permutations in their head at the same time. We make that possible. The user still selects, judges, and chooses key criteria to make a decision, we just allow people to use a computer to juggle all of them and weight them mathematically so the user can decide what’s important in making a decision, and how much more important one issue is versus others.”

What would be an example of how ChoiceAnalyst can help in the legal arena?

“Wrongful discrimination lawsuits can be handled effectively by referring to documents that demonstrate a good faith basis for termination, such as written evaluations. If you can make this decision using a decision tool, you can understand what processes you need to put into place to define this kind of problem, measure the rankings of the most important causes of the problem, print out a pdf report showing you all of the scoring for all of the criteria, and then have that for analysis, improvement and control, you can fulfill a Six Sigma approach in properly managing your employees.”

Give us a specific example of how ChoiceAnalyst can help your clients?

“We remove buyer’s remorse. If a customer finds multiple products that meet their needs, how do they choose which one is the best? By calculating a result based on key criteria chosen by the customer, the customer can then ensure that it has made the best possible decision using a methodology that provides a sense of confidence that everything has been considered in arriving at the best choice.”

How can ChoiceAnalyst help with more effective contracting processes?

“We can help salespersons sort through the most important contract terms that cause problems for their customers, and properly draft a contract that best alleviates customer pain and allows them to make the decision to buy with the least amount of contract review and negotiation.”

Thanks, Cary.