Archive for the ‘lean-six-sigma’ Category

Employee Engagement is Crucial for Lean Six Sigma Success

Friday, May 17th, 2013

In order for Lean Six Sigma to be successful, there has to be engagement at every level of the production process.  This is especially true for employees, since employee engagement is the key to achieving a maximum return on investment in the Lean Six Sigma program.

Employees trained in Lean Six Sigma techniques can be an enormous asset to a company.  Since employees are intimately familiar with production techniques and processes, they are a valuable resource for identifying inefficient or unnecessary steps in production.  However, simply training employees in Lean Six Sigma techniques is not enough to fully implement the program.  Employee engagement is crucial for the success of Lean Six Sigma.

One of the main benefits that Lean Six Sigma provides for employees is an increased sense of their impact on company profits.  Make sure to provide feedback on the positive impacts that employees make when they use Lean Six Sigma techniques, and consider implementing an incentive program to inspire employees to stay engaged in the Lean Six Sigma process.  If employees are rewarded for producing quantifiable improvements in the production chain, they are more likely to stay invested in the program.

Additionally, while implementing the Lean Six Sigma program into the company culture, take steps to ensure that employees have opportunities to express their thoughts and suggestions.  Employees have a unique perspective on production processes, and are in a position to offer valuable advice or strategies for eliminating waste.  Send out surveys, meet with employees, or set up a social media page on which employees can share their thoughts, suggestions, and successes with Lean Six Sigma.  Giving employees a voice and incorporating them into the implementation of your company’s Lean Six Sigma practices is an excellent way to build employee engagement.

If you would like to learn more about Lean Six Sigma, please visit our website.  We offer several Lean Six Sigma courses, as well as tips for implementing Lean Six Sigma.  If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us!

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3 Vital Things to Learn about Lean Six Sigma in Under 30 Seconds

Thursday, May 2nd, 2013

Errors rob your company of money. Money you could use to hire workers, increase wages, add new benefits, purchase new equipment, and more. You probably don’t even see the loss. But every time one of your employees inadvertently makes a mistake, it is there.

So what do you do?

Look into Lean Six Sigma. It takes less than 30 seconds to see how Lean Six Sigma can help you in three ways. Specifically:

  • Lean flow eliminates waste
  • Six Sigma is driven by quality
  • Together as Lean Six Sigma they achieve quality without waste

That’s it. Now actually learning, developing, and implementing a Lean Six Sigma program takes a lot more time than a mere 30 seconds. However, the concept is not that difficult to understand.

If you’re still not convinced, here is a little more information about how your organization can eliminate waste and drive quality. Focus on:

Wait Time. Delays due to wasted time between steps occur in every business. But there are numerous tools available to reduce this idle time and increase overall speed. Consider how this fleet management tool from inthinc Technology Solutions, Inc. helped reduce average idle time by 53 percent and carbon emissions by 30 percent.

Poor Quality. Defects in products destroy customer confidence. Meeting quality standards can’t be a sometime thing. When the waitperson gets your meal wrong or the airline loses your bag, your next decision about where to eat or which airline to fly is influenced. 

Variation. Deviating from customer specifications or expectations results in unhappy customers. Whether it is a promise to deliver a part on a specific date or to manufacture it with a defined tolerance, work that falls outside the defined parameters may result in a damaged reputation.

Lean Six Sigma is about reducing all the day-to-day errors in your business operations by eliminating – or at least reducing – delays, defects, and extreme deviation.

If Lean Six Sigma sounds like the right idea for your business, browse my website, review my blog, and contact the Pyzdek Institute for further information.

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Can Lean Six Sigma Make CSI Better?

Thursday, April 25th, 2013

While the CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) teams on television may be able to resolve a case in under an hour, real life criminal cases can take days, weeks, months, even years to finish.

And like many real life police units throughout the country, the police in Monroe County in western New York found themselves faced with a backlog of criminal cases involving DNA analysis.

To eliminate the backlog, decrease case turn-around time, and increase overall quality of lab reports, Monroe County outsourced the crime lab work to Sorenson Forensics. Sorenson is the first accredited forensics lab that offers Lean Six Sigma consulting services for DNA labs. They use the methodology to improve performance, efficiency, and quality. They indicate it has:

  • Helped them streamline casework reviews
  • Eliminated variation, defects, and waste
  • Created continuous, value-added flow

Now Sorenson consults with other forensic agencies to achieve the same results. The goal is to move caseloads through the system more efficiently, quickly, and accurately. Forensics investigators get results in days and weeks, rather than months.

According to Sorenson Forensics Executive Laboratory Director Tim Kupferschmid:

“A Lean Six Sigma process, when effectively implemented into a crime laboratory, results in a dramatic decrease in turn-around-time and the elimination of the existing backlog.” 

While results may vary, Sorenson suggests that using LSS reduces:

  • Operational costs (20% to 30%)
  • Rework (100%)
  • On-time delivery (100%)

Additionally, it improves customer and employee satisfaction.

Remarkable advances in DNA testing and high-tech diagnostics provides labs with the ability to dig deeper into crime scene evidence. The job is methodical and time consuming. The ability to decipher traces of evidence is complicated. Crime labs are “under the gun” to produce reliable evidence.

As with anything new, fear of change in a crime lab makes people nervous. Lean Six Sigma is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Management needs to be involved and support the changes every step of the way. Constant communication is imperative.

However, crime labs have found that LSS offers:

  • Increased team morale
  • Reduced lab-processing times
  • Reduced backlog
  • Increased output
  • Reduced errors

This is great news when you’re constantly up against deadlines. Even better, it results in more crimes solved and more criminals taken off the street.

For more information on how Lean Six Sigma can help your team perform more effectively and offer better results, contact us about Lean Six Sigma training.

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Lean Six Sigma Skills Still in Demand in 2013

Thursday, April 18th, 2013

A new report from executive search firm The Avery Point Group indicates the demand for continuous improvement talent and Lean Six Sigma skills has more than doubled from 2010.

Although there have been three consecutive years of sustained demand for Lean Six Sigma skills, there was also a noticeable improvement in the demand for Six Sigma talent alone.

This marked the first time in the study’s history where demand for pure Six Sigma talent saw a noticeable year-over-year improvement relative to Lean. 

The report cited that Lean tends to be the dominate skill requirement within job postings. However, Six Sigma came on stronger this year even within Lean job postings.

Several factors in this year’s report include: 

  • Even with Six Sigma’s “resurgence,” Lean still dominates as the desired skill. However, Six Sigma is important to continuous improvement as companies recognize that Lean isn’t necessarily sufficient to meet every continuous improvement need.
  • According to the 7,097 Internet job postings reviewed for the study, 41 percent of the job openings sought pure Lean skills, while 27 percent sought pure Six Sigma skills. This suggests that companies may feel Lean’s focus on waste, flow, and flexibility is more practical.
  • Though demand for Lean talent exceeded Six Sigma by slightly more than 24 percent, this was still a large drop from last year’s record-setting 68 percent.

Overall, the results seem to indicate that even though Lean dominates, Six Sigma plays an important role in corporate continuous improvement.

Ultimately, Lean and Six Sigma are complementary strategies that offer significant benefits when implemented individually. However, used in combination they provide a cohesive approach that increases improvements in quality, efficiency, and productivity.

Lean Six Sigma is a leading management technique that maximizes production efficiency and maintains control over each step in the process. For more information on Lean Six Sigma tools, concepts, training, and certification, contact Thomas Pyzdek, well-known Lean Six Sigma expert and author of The Six Sigma handbook, a standard reference in the field.

The Pyzdek Institute offers Lean training, Six Sigma training, and Lean Six Sigma training.

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Lean Six Sigma and the 5S Program

Thursday, April 11th, 2013

In Lean Six Sigma, the 5S program stands for the Japanese words seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, and shitsuke. Roughly translated, the American equivalent becomes:

Sort. Separate and eliminate unnecessary tools, parts, and methods to de-clutter work areas.

Systematize (or Set in Order). Organize and arrange retained tools, parts, and methods to find them more efficiently.

Sweep (or Shine). Clean and maintain retained tools, parts, and the work area to infuse workers with pride.

Standardize. Arrange and maintain identical work areas to identify abnormalities quickly.

Sustain. Maintain new work standards while reviewing and updating for continual improvement, and retaining the new status quo.

In general, 5S is not just a methodology, it’s a culture, used to organize, develop, and sustain a productive work environment. The benefit of utilizing 5S is that if offers improved safety, productivity, housekeeping, and employee satisfaction.

However, according to the Institute of Industrial Engineers, knowing where to begin improvement efforts is the first and biggest challenge in 5S. To eliminate waste you have to identify waste. Then you need to pinpoint the causes. Many workplaces wind up fighting fires. Reactive problem solving is always less efficient than proactivity.

Additionally, it’s critical to realize that 5S is about more than just housekeeping. It isn’t a fancy way to describe audit sheets or check lists. It’s not about remodeling or cleaning up a work area. Instead, it places in practice the Lean philosophy of continuous improvement. And, like LSS, it’s a tool for finding and correcting irregularities (or defects).

Though, it is often used to teach the general waste reduction concepts of Lean, it’s important not to simply think of 5S as a teaching tool. It is useful in creating and maintaining efficient and effective work areas.

Finally, the only way for 5S to be effective is to recognize, like LSS, it takes everyone in the organization to make it successful.

If your organization is looking for information, training, and guidance regarding Lean Six Sigma, 5S, and other LSS tools, browse our website, read our blog, or contact us directly. When it comes to Lean Six Sigma, we offer training, certification, and more.

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The Philosophy of Lean Six Sigma

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

Lean Six Sigma actually combines two great philosophies: Toyota’s lean manufacturing process philosophy and Motorola’s Six Sigma management philosophy. Ultimately, the goal is to produce the greatest possible output using tasks that produce the best results and happiest customers.

Lean as a Continuous Improvement Philosophy

The lean philosophy in two words: eliminate waste. This includes wasted time, human action, inventory, equipment usage, and materials.

The lean methodology focuses on streamlining each process to determine how to eliminate anything that does not add value for the customer. The goal is to “design out” inconsistencies while ensuring the process is as flexible as necessary to eliminate stress or “overburden.”

Ultimately, lean means doing more with less – effort, equipment, time, space, and money – while giving customers exactly what they want.

Six Sigma’s Critical Process Philosophy 

Unlike lean, the Six Sigma philosophy targets the elimination of manufacturing defects  through process knowledge. It focuses on mechanisms designed to compare customer need metrics with operational processes to ensure alignment. By integrating the principles of business, engineering, and statistics you achieve quantifiable results.

Therefore, using a structured statistical analysis approach, we can base decisions on data, while actions focus on customers’ needs.

Lean Six Sigma Philosophy 

While lean techniques focus on speed and increasing the amount of work completed in a process or value stream, Six Sigma focuses on improving the quality of each process to achieve a better result. Combined, they strive to offer the best business approach for satisfying customers.

By utilizing the tools of lean to eliminate waste and the tools of Six Sigma to focus on quality results, LSS offers a powerful method of meeting customer’s needs. The result is:

  • Better execution by linking strategic plans and operational improvements
  • Customer loyalty by focusing on customers’ needs
  • Greater returns by reducing operating costs and delivery times

Ultimately, the customers get what they need, want, and value. Your organization gains recognition, loyalty, and success.

For more information on Lean Six Sigma methodology or LSS training programs, review our website or contact us directly.

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Lean Six Sigma Simplifies Tasks through Process Mapping

Thursday, March 21st, 2013

A primary component of Lean Six Sigma is eliminating documented and undocumented waste.

Documented waste, frequently tracked through an organization’s automated systems, is easier to measure and correct. However, undocumented waste – non-value-added steps and events unintentionally incorporated into a process over time, sometimes along with required value-added steps – is often more troubling.

That’s when Process Mapping becomes a useful tool.

Process Mapping Overview

Process Mapping is a proven method used to find both value-added and non-value-added steps. It shows the current process for making products. By documenting, analyzing, and designing the best flow of materials and information needed to produce a good (or service) and bring it to the consumer, you can identify problems to correct and find opportunities to save time and money.

Using a value stream in Lean Six Sigma requires you to consider every part of the work system. This includes people, activities, and information, because even small problems can create big waste over time.

Though Process Mapping is a technique most often associated with manufacturing, other segments of the business community – service, supply chain, and logistics – have implemented it as well.

In fact, a friend recently explained a situation in the human resources department of her company. Though she didn’t realize it at the time, she was implementing a similar technique.

Apply Process Mapping to Simple Tasks

My friend explained that the human resources department had long been responsible for employment verifications. However, during a conversation with an assistant, my friend learned about the current process.

Seems that when the department receives an employment verification form it is recorded in a log. Then some of the information requested on the form is completed. A copy is made and sent to payroll and the original form is held in the log file. Payroll notes financial information and returns the copy to human resources.

Human resources transfers the payroll information from the copy to the original, signs it, makes another copy of the completed form, and mails the original. The completed copy goes in the employee’s personnel file.

After shaking her head for a few moments, my friend suggested that payroll complete the entire process and then send human resources a copy for the employee file. End of story.

The purpose of this story is to demonstrate how easy it is to turn a simple process into a complicated one. That’s what many companies do without realizing it.

Lean Six Sigma helps you understand which steps add value. For more information on Lean Six Sigma or LSS training programs, review our website or contact us directly.

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How to Eliminate the Seven Kinds of Waste Using Lean Six Sigma

Thursday, March 7th, 2013
Scotty

Scotty

There are seven major types of non-value-added work:

  1. Overproduction (producing more than is required)
  2. Transport (often necessary, but still a waste)
  3. Inventory  (requires storage and transportation)
  4. Sub-processes (inspections, approvals, and other SOPs)
  5. Waiting (idle time for meetings, schedule changes, lost tools, and more)
  6. Correction (repairs, rejects, defects)
  7. Motion (unnecessary motions are wasteful)

Though as an organization you may find some of these – transportation and inventory, for instance – are necessary, they don’t add value to the customer’s experience. When trying to increase value for your customers with Lean Six Sigma, value equals only what the customer is willing to pay for the right product or service at the right time in the right place.

Therefore, improving the customer experience depends on your ability to define what the customer really needs and eliminate non-value added steps to provide it.

Define What the Customer Needs

Lean Six Sigma can help you identify what the customer needs and utilize the information to improve the customer experience. Knowing their needs enables you to discover what they value and how satisfied they are with your ability to deliver that value.

Capturing what your customers need, want, and value requires you to:

  • Collect user-generated content. Surveys, social media, focus groups, and other forms of feedback-gathering tools allow you to gather data.
  • Organize the data retrieved. Affinity diagrams, structure tree, and relationship charts enable you to classify customer preferences.
  • Analyze customer preferences. DMAIC and DFSS ensure that the processes you focus on are the ones important to your customer.

In addition, LSS techniques such as Voice of the Customer provide tools that can help capture customer needs.

Eliminate Non-Value Added Steps

Defining customer needs is only the first step in the equation. Customer-facing processes gain a lot by removing non-value added activities. For an action to be value-added:

  • the customer must care about the step
  • the step must change the product or service or be essential to another step
  • the step must be right the first time

While the ultimate goal is to remove steps that don’t meet these criteria, you may need to retain some non-value added steps for compliance or financial reasons.

As so clearly stated in the bulletin, “Improving Customer Satisfaction with Lean Six Sigma” significantly increasing customer satisfaction will lead to increased sales and market share. With Lean Six Sigma, you gain the ability to identify and provide what your customers need, want, and value. For more information on Lean Six Sigma or LSS training programs, review our website or contact us directly.

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Use 5-Whys to Eliminate Non-Value-Added Steps in Your Lean Six Sigma Process

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

 

Scotty

Scotty

Lean Six Sigma is all about doing the right things in the most efficient way in order to provide value to customers. Yet, organizations routinely include non-value-added steps – work that isn’t important to the customer – that increase expenses.

Since customers only want to pay for value, it makes no sense to incorporate non-value-added activities into the mix. But how do you find and eliminate these steps without upsetting the entire process. The best way is to ask, “Why?”

Why Ask, “Why?”

A simple, yet effective method of getting to the root of an issue is the “5 Whys” method. Developed by Toyota Production Systems and used frequently in Lean Six Sigma, it requires you to look at a problem and repeatedly ask why.

Repeatedly asking the question “why” allows you to strip away assumptions and helps you find the cause of a problem. It points out the importance of viewing each process through different eyes, not accepting things as they’ve always been done, and looking for those steps that truly are not necessary.

Practice Asking “Why?”

While many feel that five repetitions of asking why is generally sufficient to get to a root cause, it may require more questions, it may only point out a symptom, and it may never lead you to the root cause. However, when combined with other Lean Six Sigma tools, it can be very useful.

Here’s a simplified example of how it works. This client was shipped bad products.

  • Why?
  • They were built to a specification different from what the customer and sales agreed to.
  • Why?
  • There was an error in the communication.
  • Why?
  • Sales called it in instead of completing a spec form.
  • Why?
  • The form requires the sales director’s approval, which slows the process down.

Ultimately, the company decided that the sales director merely needed to be kept in the loop and did not need to review and sign each spec.

If you find problems in your work processes, it may be due to non-value added work steps. We can help by providing your team assistance with Lean Six Sigma and LSS training programs. For more information, review our website or contact us directly.

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Combining Lean Six Sigma with Simulation Software

Friday, February 8th, 2013
scott-yates

Scotty

Systems rarely perform exactly as predicted.

This is the opening line from a Predicting Process Variability blog. It is also, according to the blog, “the driving force behind most improvement projects.”

Because variability is inherent in all processes, regardless if you work in manufacturing or at a bank, there will always be some amount of waste. However, without waste, you could eliminate overtime, lost sales, errors, long lead times, and so many other factors that lead to increased costs.

In the perfect Lean Six Sigma environment, variability and defects would be eliminated. While there are no perfect work environments, a process simulation tool can aid you by visually showing how work moves through a process, thereby allowing you to validate the data collected.

A good simulation application takes into account process variation, uncertainties, and interdependencies, and allows you to:

  • test alternative solutions quickly and easily with little risk
  • remove subjectivity from the equation and emotion from the decision making
  • sell others on the best solutions
  • reuse models, thereby increasing continuous improvement
  • consider the impact on customers

Simulation is useful when:

It is too expensive or risky to do live tests. Simulation offers an inexpensive, risk-free way to test changes.

Large or complex systems are under consideration. Better to get an objective analysis than make a SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess).

Predicting process variability is important. Simulation can point out how various components interact and affect overall system performance.  

You have incomplete data. The right detailed model can help identify important missing data. 

You need to communicate ideas. It allows participants to communicate better because they have a better understanding of the system.

Combining Lean Six Sigma with simulation software helps you to understand the impact of recommended process changes and enables you to make resource adjustments, perform experiments, and analyze and modify processes to determine the best practices for your business.

Lean Six Sigma is what we do. To learn more about Lean Six Sigma and the training programs we have available, contact us for more information.

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