SAI Global Assurance Services’ Director of Education and Training, Mr Martin Searle, said: “The internationally
recognised Six Sigma programmes will be of great benefit to Australian businesses as they seek to deliver quality products and services to the global market place.
“The programmes will also provide business professionals with a comprehensive understanding of how Six Sigma’s measurement based strategy can help them achieve effective process improvements,” said Mr Searle.
“SAI Global is one of the only providers in the Asia-Pacific that can offer the most advanced Black Belt Six Sigma training programme, which runs for six days and will help businesses develop a framework for an actual project their organisation is undertaking.”
The programme can help businesses measure the return on an investment, maximise the application of business improvement techniques, and integrate training with their management systems. It can also assist organisations to:
· improve client retention
· reduce travel costs
· reduce staff turn over
· improve speed to market.
“Put simply, Six Sigma’s data driven methodology can help your business eliminate defects in any process and can describe quantitatively how a process is performing.”
Six Sigma was developed in 1987 through the Motorola Six Sigma quality programme. The Sigma is a character of the Greek alphabet that is used in mathematical statistics to define standard deviation. The concept of standard deviation relates to how tightly all the various outputs of a process are clustered around the mean in a set of data.
To achieve Six Sigma, a process must not produce more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. A Six Sigma defect is defined as anything outside of customer specifications, with a Six Sigma opportunity being the total quantity of chances for a defect.
The most common tool used for Six Sigma improvement is the Define-Measure-Analyse-Improve-Control [D-M-A-I-C] cycle. This approach focuses on ensuring that the improvement is clearly defined and measured, through a data-driven and disciplined approach. Data is analysed to identify problems and the improvement is consolidated through process controls.
Safer Electrical Installations Handbook Released
Improving the safety of our children, our elderly parents and people with disabilities should be of paramount concern to society. Yet every year people in these groups are hurt, injured and sometimes killed, due to electrical accidents. A new handbook being published by Standards New Zealand Safer Electrical Installations for Children, Elderly and People with Disabilities has been released. It provides expert guidance on how to avoid these accidents through safer electrical installations, as well as how to improve people’s life-styles through more efficient electrical facilities. The home is one of the few environments where we like to think we have control and where we and those we care about, are out of harm’s way. Ironically, it is in the home where a large number of accidents occur.
Shelly Hanifan, the director of Safekids, the child injury prevention service of Starship Children’s Hospital in Auckland, reports that the three fatal electrical accidents involving children which occurred last year, all took place in the home. "Children are particularly vulnerable to electrical accidents because electricity cannot be seen and the dangers that exist are not obvious", she says . "A standard power point is rated for an electrical current of 10 amps but a current of as little as one tenth of an amp can cause the heart to go into spasm. There is plenty of electricity in a normal socket in a normal home to kill a child. Safekids would like to see safety switch protection on all electrical outlets - so that children are protected if they do get into difficulties with power".
Scalding is another major issue for children - either from tap water set at too high a temperature, or from children pulling cords attached to hot water jugs and kettles. Children’s skin burns almost twice as quickly as adults do. The handbook recommends that hot water in old people’s homes, early childhood centres and schools should be at a maximum temperature of 45 ºC, rather than the 65 ºC commonly set in homes.
Most electrical accidents to children occur before the age of five, so Safekids would like to see the handbook distributed to anyone concerned with the care of very young children, including parents.
Pat Cunniffe from the New Zealand Council of Elders takes that a step further and says that anybody who has a personal interest in being safe at home should be interested in the handbook. "Most people prefer to stay in their own homes for as long as possible, and some people are literally being scared out of their homes", she says. While the number of things we can do to prevent threats from the outside, such as home invasions, is limited, we can reduce the number of accidents occurring within the home.
There are numerous aspects of daily living that present hazards to elderly people, that just doesn’t occur to fully able-bodied people. For example, elderly people need to feel safe in the shower, a handrail and water set at a safe temperature help people feel secure, Cunniffe says.
Another area where many accidents occur is the kitchen. The handbook recommends having an ‘appliance garage’ which keeps larger and heavier appliances in one space, so that they don’t have to be lifted or moved around. Some elderly people are reluctant to use modern technology, Cunniffe says. Certain devices, such as alarm systems, are seen as too complex, and others, such as microwaves, are seen as unsafe. When microwaves first came out, many elderly people refused to use them, even though they present an ideal cooking solution for people living on their own, as many elderly people do. The way to get around this is to have intensive education programmes, which reassure elderly people that they will be able to operate a particular electrical device safely, Cunniffe says. "The message we want to get across, and this handbook is one means to do so, is that it is preferable to preserve people’s independence in the home for as long as possible." Bill Wrightson is a building consultant who also has a disability,
and was involved in drafting the standard NZS 4102 Safer housing design, from which this handbook takes many of its principles.
He welcomes the handbook in that it identifies the needs of these particular interest groups for safe electrical installations, but he believes ultimately they must be brought into mainstream design. "If you make the home safer for children, the elderly and people with disabilities, you’re making it safer for everybody."
Concrete Masonry – Smart, savvy and street-wise
Concrete as a building material is undervalued and underutilized, according to a group of expert enthusiasts who helped put together a revised national standard for concrete masonry.
The standard NZS 4229:1999 Concrete masonry buildings not requiring specific engineering design is intended largely for residential buildings or other low-rise concrete buildings, rather than the concrete skyscrapers dominating our city sky-lines.
As a residential building material concrete has, to date, not managed to secure a very large niche of the market for itself, with only an estimated three to four hundred full concrete masonry houses being built per annum.
Traditionally it has been viewed as a damp, messy and generally unappealing material for use in residential housing, both within the building industry and amongst the general public, Andrew Wilton from Firth Industries says. But concrete is undeserving of such bad press and both homeowners and designers are missing out by not taking advantage of its unique design properties, he maintains.
Firth Industries recently funded an in-depth research project carried out at the University of Auckland and the University of Canterbury which showed that partially filled masonry has excellent seismic resistance for use in earthquake zones, as well as a significant increase in bond beam spans and advances in the use of concrete floor diaphragms.
David Barnard representing the Cement and Concrete Association chaired the committee drafting the standard says the new research has made it possible to bring the design requirements in the standard closer to reality, in that it allows for far greater flexibility of design than previously allowed. The last version of NZS 4229 came out 13 years ago and is a fairly conservative document. "There are a lot of things we are allowed to do today that we were not able to then" he says.
The original draft of the document was based on research commissioned by Firth Industries. One of the most important roles for the committee was to carry out an engineering audit of the design aspects of the draft, Barnard says. Careful attention was also given to detailed comments from the BIA.
Graeme Beattie from the Building and Research Association of New Zealand (BRANZ) says the new standard addresses issues relating to durability which the previous version of the standard did not. In particular it addresses suitable coatings for masonry walls which prevents external moisture getting in. Beattie cites advances in computer-modeling, allowing designs with greater distances between walls, and therefore more scope for use of the non-specific design Standard.
Bob Laybourn, a consulting engineer who helped draft the standard, says a major challenge in producing the standard was to allow the maximum amount of flexibility in design under the New Zealand Building Code, while guaranteeing the building would be structurally safe. The paradox of this standard is that all the engineering details had to be sorted out first, so that others can use the document without needing to refer to engineering design he says.
The new version of NZS 4229 is intended to be used in conjunction with other standards, as it does not address the entire building envelope, covering only walls and floors and excludes roofs. Most roofs are built of timber so it is likely NZS 3604 Timber framed buildings will be used as its ‘sister’ document. Many buildings are ‘hybrid’ buildings, particularly in hilly places like Wellington, where buildings are cut into hills and require concrete retaining walls, but may have a timber upper storey. Thus, the Standard will apply to both masonry buildings up to two stories high, as well as ‘hybrid’ buildings with two masonry lower stories and a timber framed top storey.
But this utilitarian view of concrete once again, undervalues the positive benefits of using concrete as your primary building material, Wilton says. Concrete, in fact, provides a far more comfortable living environment than timber, as its high density allows it to be thermally efficient and maintain an even temperature, without the large temperature swings experienced in timber houses. It is also fireproof, good for earthquake prone areas and recent research has meant a lot of the building expense, previously associated with concrete construction has been ‘knocked out of it’, he says.
Gerald Melling from Wellington architecture firm Melling:Morse Architects was not involved in drafting the standard, but is a long-standing enthusiast of concrete
masonry. He says there is a prejudice against concrete in New Zealand, which is largely the result of a ‘knee jerk’ reaction. Originally from England, Melling says the situation in New Zealand is opposite to that in Europe where there is a great masonry tradition. "Personally I have never had a prejudice against concrete. Coming from my background I love masonry."
Builders in New Zealand are not overly familiar with concrete masonry, but if there was a higher demand for it, they would quickly adapt to the demands of the market, Melling says.
Melling: Morse Architects have built a number of houses making extensive use of concrete masonry, and for greater thermal efficiency in some cases have submerged the concrete blocks underground. "If people go along to an earth sheltered building using concrete blocks they will discover it is warm and - if properly planned - full of light".
Melling is also a proponent of the aesthetic qualities of concrete blocks, which he says give buildings a sense of scale. "By expressing the concrete block you give buildings a human dimension, much as brick masonry does." Painting concrete blocks ruins the aesthetic as far as Melling is concerned, and also ties homeowners in to the five year repainting cycle, although he concedes paint does make the blocks waterproof.
You can easily waterproof the blocks however, through using specially designed coatings which do not alter the appearance of the block. In the past there has been a problem with varying degrees of porosity of concrete blocks, which has largely been resolved now, particularly through the application of waterproof coatings, Melling says.
Many of the myths about using concrete have now been dispelled, so it is only a matter of time before builders, designers and home owners catch on to the opportunities it offers.
