Paper Airplanes and Measuring Tape: An Introduction to Six Sigma by OJ Mateo, Incoho Senior Project Manager

Paper Airplanes and Measuring Tape

 by OJ Mateo

“You will design a prototype paper airplane, launch it and measure. The team with the most stable performance prototype wins a free lunch.” This was the instruction given by my boss, Kyle Bendijo, when he called over the different operations managers and team leads to his office. Knowing the boss for some time now, I’m already anticipating that this is going to be another one of his “creative training methods” Early on in my career, I was very much like how Daniel-San was in doubt of Miyagi having him do wax-on, wax-off on the vintage cars in the Karate Kid movie. But having experienced his management style for several years, I have come to understand and even appreciate his approach in developing his managers. There is sound method to his madness.

We divided ourselves into two groups and were given about thirty minutes to come up with a prototype design. We debated among ourselves as to what would be the best design. We decided to keep it simple and focus on length of flight. But after thinking about it, the boss didn’t say that the longest flight would win. He said the prototype with the most stable performance would win. So the most common sensical conclusion we arrived at was longest and straightest. Which got us thinking - what is his definition of stable? So we went about designing the prototype with the attributes in mind.

After the production period was over, it was now time to conduct launch tests. Kyle called the two groups over to a long stretch of hallway. Additional instruction was that we were to launch the planes from a single starting point following a flight path represented by a straight line created by the gaps between the floor tiles. The total distance was to be measured which would account for the “longest” attribute and the distance that the plane lands from the designated flight path, would account for the “straightest” attribute.

We made a total of 10 launch flights. The other team did their launch tests too and measurements were done. The results were tallied by the boss. We were worried because the other team recorded really long flights compared to ours. Kyle then proceeds to give us an explanation on getting the mean and standard deviation of the results. Now if this started as the usual training lecture, I’d probably be bored out of my pants. And with mathematical terms like mean, median, variance, would usually be enough to make me start yawning. Never did like math but with activities like these, you’d start appreciating its practical aspects. So, with some instructions from the boss, we proceeded to enter the data into a spreadsheet and start crunching the numbers to arrive at our prototype’s flight performance, which was essentially computing for the upper limit, lower limit of the distance and accuracy figures, computing the span, giving weights to the two attributes, jumping up and down for one minute and reciting Mary had a little Lamb backwards, all commencing to come up with the SPAN, which h is the figure to represent the stability of the performance of the prototype. I learned on later that it meant “consistently long and consistently straight.” And no, that’s not the tagline for Viagra. We then compared figures with the results of the other team’s tests, and after a final check by the boss, it was determined that we won the exercise.

Winning has its perks. Who’d have thought that I’d learn something by flying paper airplanes? Another regular day at Incoho, I guess.  Thanks boss.

Alain Ariel "Kyle" Bendijo is Incoho's VP for Process Excellence and Philippine Operations.  He first joined Incoho as the Commercial Credit and Colletions Manager and was responsible for handling Incoho's first accounts which included two of the top credit card issuer in the Philippines. He holds a Masters Degree in Business Administration and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Human Resource Management from DLSU. Kyle is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. He is also a certified PADI Divemaster and has been diving in the Philippines since 1994.  Kyle also lists digital photography among his many interests.