Domain name change

In an effort to continually improve this blog, I’m now mapping it to its own domain name. Please update your links and bookmarks to:

learnsigma.com

Its a bit of a pun on leansigma, but its not lean you see it’s learn. I should have been on the stage (the first one out of town perhaps).

Sorry about all of the changes and updates to links and bookmarks my small bands of readers have had to go through recently, but:

If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.

My old blogs were really experiments for me and had become bloated with non-value added crud – a lot of which were my attempts as fiddling around with the CSS. WordPress has a cleaner feel and its flexibility allows me to concentrate less on the programming and more on the content of the posts themselves.

Other things which are bugging me about this site so far are:

• the pre-installed feedreader is pants now fixed with feedburner
• file links on the pages tabs are broken, as is the related blog post searches
• categories are too numerous – what about tags?
• sort out technorati done
• review and update all blog posts: content and links, etc
• set-up google apps underway

It’s really all about:

Simplify, simplify, simplify!” is the battle cry. Continuous improvement never ends in a lean enterprise.

Lean Six Sigma and a Particularly Virulent Case of Chicken Pox

I’m amazed at how rapidly lean six sigma is spreading across non-traditional industry sectors, rather like a particularly virulent case of chicken pox. Firstly, in aviation: for example, the is the fastest-selling new airplane in aviation history and uses composites on the airframe to allow the huge structure to be built in just one piece. This means essentially there are six major end items coming together in final assembly — the forward, centre and aft fuselage sections, the wings, the horizontal stabilizer and the vertical fin.

Since the 787 is assembled from these large assemblies rather than many smaller pieces, traditional monument assembly tools are not necessary. Portable tools, designed with ergonomics in mind, move the assemblies into place. No overhead cranes are used to move airplane structure. A composite airframe also means less waste in production and fewer hazardous materials used during the assembly process. Boeing aims to improve the production time from seven weeks to one airplane every three days.

Still on aviation, Mark over at Lean Blog has spotted a great story relating to kaizen-type activities at Southwest Airlines.

Next to pharmaceuticals, Meikah at sixsig.info reports that Sanofi Aventis are deploying six sigma and are so proud of it they have produced a case study to download. A summary of the key points are:

• Training, facilitated by Motorola, of employees to be Six Sigma Black Belts.
• Broadening of Six Sigma activities by incorporating Lean Six Sigma Tools.
• Boost of the morale of employees when they saw Six Sigma as part of their job to continuously improve processes. Six Sigma has pervaded the whole organization as employees took ownership of the initiative and got rewarded by their efforts.

Finally, six sigma is also making gains in financial services however the focus here is on revenue enhancing projects and not just cost reduction initiatives, why? –

Labour and material are some of the largest cost contributors in manufacturing. Compare that to a lending institution or a bank: their largest expense is not labour or material, but cost of funds. So, the key is to focus on occurrence – once you get a customer in-house, how to make sure that you keep them and get the most value from the relationship.

Do you work in a market sectors where lean or six sigma is being deployed? Leave a comment below.

image credit

Dumb Leaders Destroy Six Sigma

Here’s a question:

Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a Six Sigma exercise to measure a person’s innate aptitude and passion for a customer-facing role from pre-sales, to sales, through service, at all management levels?

Erm, not to me but possibly to some (but not all) dumb leaders. They may read in a book, understand what R-Squared is and then think they get the concept of variation. Whilst I’m all for a bit of guidance I’m a great believer in “education through action”. Learn the basics from a great sensi, roll-up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. “Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand” – that’s what its about!!

Some companies believe that existing lean six sigma initiatives are not good enough and others stress that six sigma reduces innovation and as innovation relies on variation (what Six Sigma is supposed to remove), so therefore organisations who adopt six sigma are doomed never to product innovative products or services. This is baloney of the highest order and I’m sick of hearing this. What all of this shows is that some companies clearly don’t get six sigma while some do.

I stress again: six sigma is not about tools or even statistics its about adopting the right philosophy in the business. This is about training, understanding its fundamental principles and avoiding the most common types of failure.

In fact, lean six sigma, applied successfully, is being increasingly adopted outside of manufacturing. In healthcare for example:

You could say that, where a manufacturer seeks to produce quality products, a hospital seeks to produce healthy patients. If a patient falls victim to an infection while in the hospital, that is a defect that undermines the hospital’s mission and causes rework (having to cure the infection, in addition to the original illness). Therefore, reducing or eliminating infections is equivalent to eliminating waste in the form of defects and rework. And that is fundamentally lean.

What’s your understanding of lean and six sigma?

image credit

Lean means layoffs

When is lean not lean? When you use it to sack 150 000 IBM workers.

“LEAN is about offshoring and outsourcing at a rate never seen before at IBM.”

This is clearly an idiotic article written by someone who has no understanding what lean is all about.

“Layoffs don’t happen because ‘excess’ employees have been created when management got smarter about how they do business…. lean is not an immediate event but a long-term process, and that attrition is always at play. If there is a balanced approach to employee development and business management, there is no reason for layoffs…”

In fact, Toyotas culture of problem solving, reducing waste and when coupled with six sigma has been so successful that its being applied outside of manufacturing in attempt to prevent 100,000 people dieing every year due to medical error

Time to round-up the journalists and educate them I think. Oh, and you may also want to throw in a few politicians for goodluck as well.

What is multi-vari analysis?

Wikipedia says that:

Multivariate analysis (MVA) is based on the statistical principle of multivariate statistics, which involves observation and analysis of more than one statistical variable at a time. In design and analysis, the technique is used to perform trade studies across multiple dimensions while taking into account the effects of all variables on the responses of interest.

So multi-vari analysis is a technique for viewing multiple sources of process variation. Different sources of variation are categorized into families of related causes and quantified to reveal the largest causes. Instead of telling you just that shift is a factor and machine is a factor, multi-vari analysis provides a breakdown for you to say, for example, that machine B on shift 1 is causing the most variation. It won’t quantify the variation…just show you where it is. Once you’ve narrowed your list of inputs, you know where to go take more data, do more training, plan further studies, etc. Pareto analysis won’t get you to that level of detail.

Multi-Vari is the perfect tool to determine where the variability is coming from in your process (lot-to-lot, shift-to-shift, machine-to-machine, etc.), because it does not require to manipulate the independent variables (or process parameters) as you would with design of experiments.

Because it provides a great way of analysing the effects of multiple factors multi-vari analysis is widely used in six sigma projects.

You can display the effect of categorical type inputs on a response on a multi-vari chart. It is one of the tools used to reduce the trivial many inputs to the vital few. In other words it is used to identify possible Xs or families of variation, such as variation within a subgroup, between subgroups, or over time.

Although simple in nature, such a chart has considerable power. It can help you isolate the major (dominant) family of variation. For example, does most of the variation in downtime occur within-machine, machine-to-machine, within-operator, operator-to-operator, within shift, shift-to-shift, within-location, or location-to-location?

Once you have determined where the major source of variability is coming from, then you can target more efficiently your experimental designs (DOE) to reduce that particular source of variation.

Which of the 5S is hardest and why?

I recently entered a competition over at the excellent gembapantarei which posed the question, “which of the 5S is hardest and why?”. Well, the winners have been announced but my own personal suggestion was:

the most difficult “S” is Sustain: (Shitsuke). Unless a Lean philosophy has been adopted then a 5S activity will not be repeated and will therefore not become part of the culture. Change is difficult for most people and people tend to slip back into their own habits.

Dee agreed with me, but Ron over at Lean Six Sigma Academy suggested:

While it is not an official “s” in the 5S line-up the hardest one to master is without a doubt – start. You see starting does not mean go and have a company wide 5S thrust event where everyone cleans up their desks. Instead it means to start having a kaizen mentality whereby every associate is empowered and expected to think about how 5S should not just start… but never end.

The main thing is to avoid L.A.M.E. (Lean As Misguidedly Executed) because:

Looking “nice” is not the goal with 5S, it should be about being effective, organized, and productive (and safe). It might look “nice” that the tools are hidden, but again that’s not the goal. It’s a workplace and the tools required to do the work should be right at hand, especially if changeovers are done often (and hopefully they are).

Did I win?

Well watch the video and find out.

Toyota Production System
TPS
5S
Lean
Lean Manufacturing
Turbo Tagger

Seven Steps to 3P Heaven

There’s a tool which is used within Lean but doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. It’s 3Ps, which stands for:

. production
. preparation, and
. process.

How does 3P work?
Seven steps to getting 3P to installed in your company are:

1. Define Product or Process Design Objectives/Needs: The team seeks to understand the core customer needs that need to be met. If a product or product prototype is available, the project team breaks it down into component parts and raw materials to assess the function that each plays.
2. Diagraming: A fishbone diagram or other type of illustration is created to demonstrate the flow from raw material to finish product. The project team then analyzes each branch of the diagram (or each illustration) and brainstorms key words (e.g., roll, rotate, form, bend) to describe the change (or “transformation”) made at each branch.
3. Find and Analyze Examples in Nature: The project team then tries to find examples of each process keyword in the natural world. For example, forming can be found in nature when a heavy animal such as an elephant walks on mud, or when water pressure shapes rocks in a river. Similar examples are grouped and examples that best exemplify the process key word researched to better understand how the examples occur in nature. Here, team members place heavy emphasis on how nature works in the example and why. Once the unique qualities of the natural process are dissected, team members then discuss how the natural process can be applied to the given manufacturing process step.
4. Sketch and Evaluate the Process: Sub-teams are formed and each sub-tea member is required to draw different ways to accomplish the process in question. Each of the sketches is evaluated and the best is chosen (along with any good features from the sketches that are not chosen) for a mock-up.
5. Build, Present, and Select Process Prototypes: The team prototypes and then evaluates the chosen process, spending several days (if necessary) working with different variations of the mock-up to ensure it will meet criteria.
6. Hold Design Review: Once a concept has been selected for additional refinement, it is presented to a larger group (including the original product designers) for feedback.
7. Develop Project Implementation plan: If the project is selected to proceed, the team selects a project implementation leader who helps determine the schedule, process, resource requirements, and distribution of responsibilities for completion.

Are there other benefits?
3P also helps you build an entire business case for a new product process before any capital has been invested. And it can help you to accurately predict what your costs and quality will be, long before any production begins. It can purge a great deal of waste from the supply chain and help suppliers protect profit margins while meeting cost-down targets.

Do you use 3P?

Subscribe in a reader

lean manufacturing
toyota production system
toyota
3P
Turbo Tagger

image credit

Toyota Production System Quiz

From Wikipedia:

The Toyota Production System (TPS) (トヨタ生産方式) is the philosophy which organizes manufacturing and logistics at Toyota, including the interaction with suppliers and customers. The TPS is a major part of the more generic Lean manufacturing. It was largely created by the founder of Toyota, Sakichi Toyoda, his son Kiichiro Toyoda, and the engineer Taiichi Ohno; they drew heavily on the work of W. Edwards Deming and the writings of Henry Ford.

But how much do you really know about the Toyota Production System?

Take this quiz and add your results below … no cheating!

image credit

toyota
toyota production system
TPS
lean manufacturing
quiz
Turbo Tagger

Six sigma leadership

Two six sigma quotes I highlighted to myself recently. The first was from The Six Sigma Leader by Peter Pande:

“Studies have repeatedly shown that the high failure rate of many promising leaders is largely due to an over-reliance on a limited set of capabilities. Many times leaders are promoted because of a strong record of achievement, only to derail later because of their inability to adapt. For example, an individual may be good at demanding high performance from his or her followers, or have strong technical ability. However, those strengths are not sufficient when, for example, big-picture thinking or relationship building are also essential to success. To prepare yourself and others for growing challenges, you need the clarity of thought and flexibility to understand your own weaknesses and develop new talents.”

The second was from The Six Sigma Handbook by Thomas Pyzdek:

“It would be a mistake to think that Six Sigma is about quality in the traditional sense. Quality, defined traditionally as conformance to internal requirements, has little to do with Six Sigma. Six Sigma is about helping the organization make more money by improving customer value and efficiency. Six Sigma focuses on customer requirements, defect prevention, cycle time reduction, and cost savings. Thus, the benefits from Six Sigma go straight to the bottom line. Unlike mindless cost-cutting programs which also reduce value and quality, Six Sigma identifies and eliminates costs which provide no value to customers, waste cost.”

Clearly then six sigma requires leaders who understand that it is not a traditional quality program, but more importantly these leaders must understand themselves. A great six sigma leader is concerned with achieving results through people, the goodwill and support of others (influence), while a weak six sigma leader is not.

six sigma
six-sigma
6sigma
leadership
Turbo Tagger

image credit

Environmental 5S

How can 5S contribute to helping the environment? Well …

• Painting the machines and the equipment light colors and cleaning the windows, often done under the Shine pillar, decreases energy needs associated with lighting.
• Painting and cleaning makes it easier for workers to notice spills or leaks quickly, thereby decreasing spill response. This can significantly reduce waste generation from spills and clean-up.
• The removal of obstacles and the marking of main thoroughfares decreases the potential of accidents that could lead to spills and associated hazardous waste generation (e.g., spilled material, absorbent pads and clean up materials).
• Regular cleaning, as part of the Shine pillar, decreases the accumulation of cuttings, shavings, dirt, and other substances that can contaminate production processes and result in defects. Reduction in defects has significant environmental benefits (e.g., avoided materials, wastes, and energy needed to produce the defective output; avoided need to dispose of defective output).
• 5S implementation can significant reduce the square footage needed for operations by organizing and disposing of unused equipment and supplies. Less storage space decreases energy needed to heat and light the space.
• Organizing equipment, parts, and materials so they are easy to find can significantly reduce unneeded consumption. Employees are more likely to finish one batch of chemicals or materials before opening or ordering more, resulting in less chemicals or materials expiring and needing disposal.
• 5S visual cues (e.g., signs, placards, scoreboards, laminated procedures in workstations) can be used to raise employee understanding of proper waste handling and management procedures, as well as workplace hazards and appropriate emergency response procedures. 5S techniques can be used to improve labeling of hazardous materials and wastes. In addition, environmental procedures often are separate from operating procedures, and they are not easily accessible to the workstation. 5S implementation often result is easy to read, laminated procedures located in workstations. Integration with 5S visual cues and operating procedures can improve employee environmental management.

lean manufacturing
TPS
toyota production system
5S
environment
Turbo Tagger