General
- Top-down support is essential for change projects
- Project scope has to be right
Foundations
– Find out where the problems are: Missing documents, late delivery, etc.
– Get all responsible people together
– Problem solving:
- Brainstorming
- Forming hypothesis
- Collecting data
- Developing solutions
- Goals:
- Delight customers: higher quality in less time
- Improve processes: less variance & defects, better flow
- Teamwork: interdisciplinary teams
- Based on data
Delight customers
– Quality is defined by the customer
- internal
- external
– Which factors are important in the customer’s decision to buy your solution? (Critical to Quality: CTQ)
– Voice of Customer
- Tracking complaints
- Focus groups
- Visiting customer sites
- Interviews
- Surveys
– Eliminate defects
- defects: things that don’t meet the customer need
– Create consistency
– Ensure Speed, Quality and low costs
- Quality only with speed: eliminate waste & delays
- Speed only with quality: if there are errors, you have to go back
- Low price only with quality & speed
Improve processes
– Deming: 85/15 Rule; 85% problems are problems built in processes, 15% are problems by employee’s faults
– To improve quality, you have to change the system
– Process management:
- Documenting how work gets done
- Examining the flow between people
- Training people the knowledge & methods they need to constantly improve their work
- Eliminate variation in quality and speed
- What do customer want and what do they find acceptable?
- Everything else is a defect
- To generate low variation everything before the outcome has to work fine
- Improve process flow and speed
- How many process steps does it take?
- Ask for every step:
- Is it necessary?
- What value does it add to our customer?
– Think in processes
Team Work
– Environment where people are encouraged to work together
– Free sharing of information
– Meetings are full of energy
– Skills that need to be trained for effective collaboration:
- Listening
- Brainstorming & discussion techniques
- Organizing ideas
- Decision making
– Important steps:
- Set goals everyone agrees on
- Assign accountability
- Conflict handling
- Decision making metrology
- Effective meetings
- Continuous learning
- Collaboration
Data
– Foundation of six sigma
– Rule: People must support their opinions with facts
– Problems:
- Lack of available data
- Little training in collecting & analyzing data
- Data is not used for making decisions about improvement
– Result measures
- Outcome of a process
– Process measures
- Internal metrics of a process
– Typical metrics:
- Customer satisfaction (result)
- Financial outcomes (result)
- Speed or lead time (result / process)
- Quality or defects (result / process)
– Collecting data can take 75% of the time
Terms
– WIP (Work in Process): amount of work in process that isn’t complete yet
– Lead time: from order to delivery
– Little’s Law: Lead Time = WIP / Avg. Completion Rate
– Queue time: work that just sits there = delay time
– Value added work: customer wants to pay for
– Non-value added work = waste
– Complexity: different types of products/options processes have to handle
– Process Cycle Efficiency = Value-add time / Total lead time; avg about ten percent
– Flexibility: how easily can people switch between different types tasks
Laws of Lean Six Sigma
– Law of the Market: Customer needs define quality – highest priority for improvement
– Law of Flexibility: Speed of a process is proportional to its flexibility
– Law of Focus: 20% of activities make 80% of the problems
– Law of Velocity (Little’s Law)
– Law of Complexity and Cost: Complexity adds more costs and WIP than either poor quality or slow speed
Implementation
– Infrastructure
- Champions: Executive Sponsor
- Black Belts: 4-5 weeks of training on leadership + problem solving; full- or part-time; responsible for leading or coaching project teams and for delivering results on projects
- Master Black Belts: upper Black Belts, more responsibility and training
- C-Suite: setting corporate goals
- Business unit managers: work with Champions, define criteria for selecting projects that support their goals
- Line managers / process owners: Project sponsor, frees time of people for training and attending meetings, provides support
- Green Belts/Yellow/White/Team members: Usually normal job but help working on projects in their work areas
– Training programs
- For different belts
- Introduction courses
- Courses for green belts: leading projects
- Black Belt: skill building tools/methods
- Master Black Belt: Some special tools
Common Problems
– Projects didn’t address important business problems
– People became “quality commandos”
– Little or no monitoring of projects
=> Improvement should be done to support business goals not to replace them
Project Selection
– Which project adds the most value?
– Start with a burning platform, e.g. reach new customers, reduce overhead cost, speed up deployment, etc.
– Goals are translated down to business units
– then down to value streams (specific processes)
– Maintain the links at each step
Tollgate system
– Review between each DMAIC phase
– Purpose
- Status update
- Check if project is still critical
- Adjust project is necessary
- Inform management about barriers
Rollout
– A lot happens in the first I00 days – slow results aren’t any better than no results
– Starts at the top
– Formal announcement
– Project selection & training in waves
DMAIC
– forces team to use data to
- confirm a problem (nature & extend)
- identify the true causes
- find solutions
- establish procedures
– Start with project charter
- up to 2 pages
- goals of the team
- team members
- time lines
- only a draft => reiterate and communicate with management
DMAIC Phases
Define
- What is the project?
- . Discuss project charter => get shared goal
- . Get customer data => confirm possible opportunity
- . Review existing data
- . Drafting a high-level process map
- . Setting up a plan and guidelines
- Realistic scope
- What is success and how is it measured?
- Get people comfortable working together
Measure
- Develop / improve measurement system
- Gather data & improve the process map
- Find out what’s really important
- Tools
- Observe the process
- Time value map (visualize value-add time and non-value-add time)
- Pareto chart
Analyze
- find the real causes for problems
- find most critical actions
- Tools
- Fishbone diagram
- Scatterplots
Improve
- Find new solutions
- Check best practices
- Develop a criteria for selecting solutions
- Planning the implementation
- Tools
- PICK chart (Possible, Implement, Challenge, Kill)
- Four step rapid setup
Control
- Document the new process
- Train everyone
- Set up procedures for tracking KPIs
- Complete project documentation
- Tools
- Control charts