Posts Tagged ‘root cause’

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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Lean Six Sigma Lives On After It Disappears

Monday, October 12th, 2009

A while ago I was asked by a colleague to recommend a Lean Six Sigma benchmark partner for a large aerospace firm that had been using Six Sigma for quite some time. Upon calling some of my favorite clients I learned that their Lean Six Sigma initiatives had been phased out. I was dismayed to hear of this and arranged to meet with one of the senior leaders to discuss why this had occurred in his organization. I learned that what had disappeared was not the Lean Six Sigma approach. Indeed, the senior leader said he knew of no other way to manage his operations. What had gone was the Lean Six Sigma bureaucracy. The personnel devoted to coaching senior leaders, providing Lean Six Sigma courses for training, etc. were gone.
It doesn’t take a lot of thought to understand why this would occur. Lean Six Sigma has been around in one form or another since 1986. That’s a pretty long run. It has evolved into a complete system for leading organizations to operational excellence. If an organization is still using Lean Six Sigma solely to execute projects, then it is missing the benefit to be had from applying the approach in its normal day-to-day operations.
If the organization has been using Lean Six Sigma for several years, it is also wasting a lot of talent by relying too much on Belts. The nature of Lean Six Sigma’s change agent infrastructure is such that the personnel involved in the program full time are routinely cycled back into the organization. These people are “damaged goods” in the sense that they can no longer function as traditional managers. Lean Six Sigma is based on principles such as root cause identification, value flow, defect prevention, etc.. Traditional management is based on command-and-control, not process; it focuses on results, not on causes. Traditional managers manage via feedback, Lean Six Sigma Leaders manage using feed-forward models.
In short, Lean Six Sigma is at its best after it has all but disappeared from the organization chart. It is still there, embedded in everything the organization is doing in its operations. It won’t go away because its practitioners realize that old-fashioned management is horribly flawed and a terrible way to run an organization. Traditional management is a disease; the Lean Six Sigma approach, done properly, is the cure.

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My Prescription for the Healthcare Crisis

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Thomas PyzdekInspired by Some questions not asked in health care debate – BizTimes.

Like many, I am concerned about healthcare in America. The above story outlines a number of issues with our system

  • A medical error rate 5 to 9 times higher than some other countries
  • Out of control healthcare costs

The author discusses the fact that Six Sigma has only recently been introduced in American healthcare, and then only on a limited basis. He details a horror story involving his father’s care and decries the fact that such stories abound. From this he concludes that the solution to these problems is…more government involvement in American healthcare.

I’m sorry, but I don’t get the connection. I agree with the above facts and would dearly love to have American healthcare professionals use more process excellence methods, including Six Sigma, Lean, and quality improvement. But I don’t see how more government addresses the root cause of our problems. In fact, I see little or no effort made to drill down to the root cause of the problems in healthcare. Let me make a stab at it.

  • I believe that government programs have contributed to the problem by helping create a disconnect between the patient and the healthcare provider.
  • I believe that the current system limits the choice of patients as to who will provide their care.
  • I believe that patients do not have access to the information they need to adequately assess the quality of their healthcare providers.
  • I believe that special interests (e.g., pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, insurance companies, professional groups, etc.) manipulate government programs and limit access to information for their own advantage.
  • I believe that political groups use the fear of illness to manipulate voters for the interests of the politicians.
  • I believe that more government control of healthcare would exacerbate the above problems.

Solutions

I believe that solutions that address the disconnect between the person who provides the healthcare and the person who receives and pays for it will ultimately be needed to fix the problem. This is, I believe, the root cause of our current problems. An ideal solution would be one that:

  • Provides patients with complete, up to date, and accurate information on their provider. This would include information on outcomes, error rates, complaints, etc.
  • Allows patients to choose their care provider.
  • Provides patients with price data in advance.
  • Protects patients from paying for poor quality care, including any problems caused by misdiagnoses, complications from poorly done procedures, infections due to poor practices, etc.
  • Requires patients to pay at least some of the cost of their care directly to the provider. Enough to make the patient care about costs.

In other words, I believe more freedom and more responsibility for patients would address the core problem of the current system. I believe that when patients are free to choose their care provider, have complete information on quality and price, and have a personal interest in the cost of their care, they will make better choices than faceless and nameless bureaucrats employed by insurance companies or the government.

Not to lay the whole blame on government. I believe that the process and quality improvement professions have a great deal to offer the healthcare profession in the form of methods, tools, techniques and systems to improve. But healthcare professionals are overly resistant to such suggestions, at least party because of parochialism and perverse incentives. Examples of perverse incentives include physicians paid to treat complications they either cause or could have prevented, or hospitals obtaining revenues for patients whose length of stay increases because of infections contracted in the hospital. If patients were provided the information they need to make the right choices, the ability to make these choices, and the financial incentive to do so, intransigent providers would either improve or pay the price in the market for health care services. Ultimately, this would drive the demand for the services of quality and process improvement professionals. It’s what did it for every other industry in the world.

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