James Frugé

History

James studied chemistry at the Univerity of Texas graduating with a Bachelor of Science in 1974. While an undergraduate at UT he helped write the laboratory text and taught the laboratory section of Dr. F.A. Matsen's freshman quantum mechanics course. Upon graduation he was employed by Celanese Corporation to work in the new product development division of the fibers company. After four years in Charlotte NC and New York City he transferred to the Celanese chemical plant in Pampa, TX as a Special Problems Chemist. He worked at the Pampa Plant for 25+ years holding various positions. His areas of expertise included Acetic anhydride manufacturing, Liquid Phase Oxidation of Butane, technical computing, work design, and GC Mass Spec analysis. In 2001 he trained as a Six Sigma Black Belt with SBTI. Less than a year later he trained as a Six Sigma Master Black Belt working for Celanese corporation globally.

Six Sigma Experience

James started applying Six Sigma to chemical manufacturing as a Black Belt solving a 50 year old problem on his first project with a value of $.5 million per year. After becoming a Master Black Belt he spent most of his time training and coaching Green Belts and Black Belts around the world working in the US, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. After training and coaching most of the Black Belts in the corporation with fellow Master Black Belt Dr. Pradip Mehta, James began applying Six Sigma to business systems. He co-developed and trained Corporate upper management in applying Six Sigma to business processes. Together with Six Sigma Master Black Belt Rob Elliot he developed a course for applying Six Sigma to pricing. This lead to performing pricing projects at five companies in Europe and the US and overseeing projects at two others. After leaving Celanese James performed pricing for a major plumbing supply company and developed the PMT® software. He has also provided Green Belt training, Black Belt coaching, management training and coaching for a global telecommunications company. For the last two years he has been applying Six Sigma to the Bio Fuels industry. He developed Yield Calc® which allows calculation of batch efficiencies along with a proprietary analysis method that resulted in one plant increasing yields 6% with a value of $7.5 million while reducing the variability of the yield by more than half. The plant also set new monthly production records and produced more ethanol than ever in the year following the project. In addition he performed a Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ) analysis and then lead a team to reduce plant costs by several million.