Creating Process Maps: Key Ideas for a Team Facilitator

Posted on28. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

If your company is planning to start a Six Sigma or Lean project for business process improvement, chances are that some form of process maps will need to be created.  And a crucial variable leading to the success or failure of the team involved in that effort is the effectiveness of the team facilitator.

What if you are the person chosen to facilitate that process mapping team?  If you’re a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, you may well be chosen for this role.  What kind of process do you need to follow to ensure that the process maps your team produces are as accurate and useful as they can possibly be? 

(1) Identify the scope of the process your team will be mapping. 

• This must include identification of: 
  • Customer,
  • Product,
  • Starting Point,
  • Ending Point.

(2) Identify all stakeholders to the process. 

• Make sure that all stakeholders are represented on the project team. 
• The team should include about 6 – 8 people; too few risks leaving out important stakeholders, while too many becomes unwieldy.
• Also ensure that these representatives come from varying levels in the organization, including some working-level members — who know what really goes on in the process.
• Determine what measures should be taken to gain buy-in (and take them).

(3)  Schedule an initial workshop with all the team members.  

• The workshop should be at least 3 hours long. 
• Invitations should be sent with enough lead time to get on people’s calendars.
• Always follow up with team members who didn’t respond to your initial invitation. 

(4)  On the day of the workshop, make sure you do the following:

• As facilitator…
  • Enforce the ground rules!  (This includes timekeeping.) 
  • Also, you must be seen as neutral to the process being studied.  If the team perceives you to have a preexisting agenda for the process (rightly or wrongly), it will be difficult to gain their honest and full participation. 
• Start by stating the ground rules for the workshop: 
  • Safe environment for brainstorming;
  • 5-Minute Rule (contentious topics will get “parked” after 5 minutes);
  • 80/20 Rule (focus on what happens 80% of the time);
  • Keep focused on value to the customer.
• Start by gaining consensus on the scope; modify as the group sees necessary. 
• Have team members write up the process as they see it on sticky notes, one note for each step in the process. 
• Participants then stick the notes on the wall in order.
  • Duplications of a step go underneath each other.
  • Team members should move the steps around until they are satisfied with the order.
• Lead team in discussion of…
  • Decisions points
  • Hand-offs
  • Bottlenecks
  • Gaps
  • Problems
• At the end of the workshop, the team decides if any stakeholders have been left out.  Is there anyone else who should provide input?
• Agree on the next steps your team needs to take.
• Schedule the next meeting.

Process maps

are a crucial tool in business process improvement.  And a good facilitator is key to achieving accurate and insightful process maps.  If you can provide that leadership, your team will benefit — and so will your company.

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Process Mapping: Creating Business Success

Posted on28. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

Process Mapping

as a tool for creating business success has been around in one form or another for quite a long time.  The earliest forms of flowcharts were developed in the 1920’s and 1930’s as part of industrial engineering.  Since then, highly sophisticated Process Mapping tools and techniques have been developed.  Helping to drive the development of these tools was the certification standards of ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 in the early to mid 1990’s and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the early 2000’s. 

But perhaps even more important a driver is that old standby of capitalism:  Competition. 

If your competition has a shorter, less costly, and more effective process, they’ll eat your lunch.  Why would any customer pay more to wait longer for a less reliable product?  Of course, they won’t.  But under pricing pressures you can’t just price on a “cost-plus” basis.   Result?  Your prices are the same as the competition’s prices, but your costs are higher, so what suffers?  Your profitability.  Under such competitive pressures, businesses have come to scrutinize their processes in ever more detail, seeking waste that can be cut out.

Tools of Lean Manufacturing such as Value Stream Mapping have come to be used in every type of business process.  Lean Manufacturing was pioneered by Toyota and has since spread to every corner of the globe.  But Process Mapping is also a key part of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Six Sigma as well, plus combined methods such as Lean Six Sigma.

What is Process Mapping?  Simply put, it is a chart which shows every activity that must be completed in order to deliver a product or service to the end customer.  Modern versions typically include not just materials flow, but paper flow and information flow as well.  Put that way, it does sound simple.  But it’s harder than you might think, and requires an experienced business analyst and leader to do it effectively.

Here are some key areas to consider when beginning a project of Process Mapping:

(1) For one thing, you’ll need to set the boundaries of your process map.  Are you mapping a process at the macro or micro level?  Are you looking at an entire factory, or only one workcell within the factory?  How much of the upstream and downstream sub-processes do you need to show, to help inform your understanding of the area under study? 

(2) You’ll also need to identify the product, and maybe even the customer.  It’s not always as easy as you might think!  This is especially true in the case of service industries, or internal departments where the “customer” is another department of the same company.     

(3)  How much detail should your map show?  Too much detail and you risk losing the forest for the trees.  Too little detail and you may miss some important factors.

(4)  Who should be on your team?  It should be a multifunctional team from many levels, yet if it is too large the team becomes unwieldy.  Often only the workers know what really goes on, but you must be sure that these team members will not be intimidated by the views of higher-level members who have a different vision of what “should” be happening.  And when all of these people have their own “real” jobs to do (as of course they will in a multifunctional team), getting them to focus on the Process Mapping project is an art in itself.

Despite all these challenges, Process Mapping is a crucial part of business process improvement.  Just remember, your competition is monitoring their processes.  Literally, you can’t afford not to.

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Process Flow Chart: Tried and True

Posted on28. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

A Process Flow Chart

is a visual diagram describing a process, and it is one of the oldest process improvement tools still in general use.  As such, it sounds simple but can be more challenging than you might think to create one. 

The Process Flow Chart shows inputs, outputs, and all activities in between.  The chart must represent the entire process from start to finish and show action points and decision points.  It can be used for training in proper production methods, or as a starting point for process improvement efforts. 

There are many different types of process maps, but variations are used in all business process improvement techniques.  Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma — you name it, the art and science of process improvement must incorporate an understanding of the process as it currently exists.  And that means creating a Process Flow Chart. 

Some familiar types of flowcharts are: 

• Value Stream Mapping
• Swim Lanes
• SIPOC
• IDEF Mapping
• Activity Diagram
• Detailed Process Map

 
What’s the best way to go about it?  Teamwork, teamwork, teamwork. 

Perhaps an “expert” has sat down at his or her desk and drawn up a process map.  If so, accept their work with gracious thanks.  Then put together a team anyway.  No matter how great the expertise of a single person, the Process Flow Chart will be more accurate and useful if multiple viewpoints go into its development.  

Your project team should be cross-functional and taken from all levels of the organization.  Be sure to include some people who actually do the work — and make sure they know they are equal members of this team, no matter how high up in the company some other team members might be.  Often the working-level folks are the ones who know what really goes on.  If they feel that your process-improvement team is a safe place to be honest, you could learn some very useful things.  If they feel they’ll be punished for saying “The Emperor Has No Clothes” — then make sure you order the best doughnuts for your team meeting, because that’s the only good anyone will get out of the meeting. 

If your process improvement team is going to succeed in shortening lead times, cutting out waste, or both, you must avoid common pitfalls of constructing a Process Flow Chart.  These can include:

• Putting in too much or too little detail
• Defining the process under study too narrowly or too broadly
• Failing to capture the process as it currently exists
• Confusing materials flow and information flow
• Failing to identify the critical team members
• Suffering from poor team facilitation

 
Having a skilled team facilitator is crucial.  (In fact, many of the other problems listed above can be traced to poor facilitation.)  The facilitator need not be an expert in the process under study — in fact, it can even be helpful if he or she is not, since this will spark questions on topics that others on the team may take for granted.  But the team facilitator must be experienced in managing group dynamics and facilitating discussions.  Otherwise a loud or strong-willed individual can skew the results of the mapping project by overriding other, equally valid viewpoints from quieter team members.

What’s the value in constructing a Process Flow Chart?  Here are some thought-starters: 

• Helps standardize and streamline steps and sequences in a process
• Helps identify and eliminate wasted steps or activities
• Helps find better ways of doing things

 
You can’t solve a problem unless you know it exists.  In business process improvement, that starts with creating a Process Flow Chart.

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Process Capability: Is Your Process Up To The Task?

Posted on28. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

Process Capability

is a measure of how well your process performs — that is, the proportion of in-specification items that is produced by the process — when it is in statistical control. 

Note that this is not a measure of your process’s actual current performance on producing items in-spec.  (That’s batch performance.)  It is possible that your process may not be in statistical control at present, and therefore the state of current production is not necessarily relevant.

So to understand the concept of Process Capability, we need to recall what “in control” means in a statistical sense.  Statistical Process Control (SPC) refers to the use of statistics to monitor the variability of a manufacturing process.  The idea is to maintain control of the process such that some large proportion of items produced by that process are within design specifications.  Note that SPC makes no reference as to whether or not the design is a good one; a poorly-designed product will perform suboptimally no matter how well the manufacturing process sticks to the design parameters.  So Statistical Process Control does not necessarily ensure customer satisfaction or product reliability. 

However, let’s assume for the moment that the design is a robust one and the in-spec product will meet the customer’s needs.  So minimizing manufacturing defects is a definite must.  We do this using the tools of Statistical Process Control.  The most basic of these is called, naturally, the Control Chart.

Control Charts use statistical tools (based on sampling of items produced) to monitor both the central tendency of the manufacturing process, and its deviations away from the center.  The idea is to flag variations in production that may lead to items being rejected at the end of the manufacturing process. 

The manufacturing process is said to be “in control” (statistically speaking) when variation among items produced stays within the control limits.  An item falling outside the control limits, or a series of increasing or decreasing data points, should be investigated to see if there is a special or common cause that is driving these variations. 

Special cause, common cause, what’s all that? 

Say you are baking several batches of cookies.  Every batch is slightly different.  Some cookies are thinner, some are thicker, some are more done, some are less done.  However, as long as they are not charred briquettes, your spouse will eat them (in-spec). 

Now the first batch is perfect golden brown.   On the second batch, your best friend calls you on the phone just before the timer goes off.  You don’t hear it.  You forget about the cookies.  Briquette city.  Out of spec.  This represents a special cause.  Your friend called; that’s not likely to happen every time you make cookies. 

So you throw that burned batch away and start over.  Your spouse likes the cookies so well that the next week you make some more.  And the week after that, and the week after that.  Your process seems in control. 

On the fourth week, however, you start to notice that the cookies are seeming less and less done when the timer goes off.  Downright raw; out of spec.  You investigate; by putting in an oven thermometer in, you discover that your oven is not heating up as well as it used to do.  This is a common cause.  Until you get your oven repaired, none of your cookies will be baked in-spec.  (Unless your spouse likes to eat raw cookie dough.)  Your process is out of control.

Now that we understand in control, let’s revisit:  Process Capability is a measure of your process’s potential to produce items in-spec, assuming that your process is in control.

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Value Stream Mapping: Get To Know Your Process

Posted on28. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

Q:  When you start a project of business process improvement, what’s one of your most useful and versatile tools? 
A:  Value Stream Mapping. 

Value Stream Mapping

is a tool of Lean Thinking which enables you to identify the activities of a business process and their associated costs.  VSM is a great way to create and communicate process changes, and hence is a key component of any change management strategy.  Mapping the current process is usually applied during the “Measure” phase of DMAIC in Lean Six Sigma.  Mapping the desired future process is part of the “Improve” phase. 

The most basic philosophy of Lean Thinking is “Add only value — that the customer is willing to pay for.”  To achieve this, one of the most important activities you can undertake is to map out your process and discover which steps waste time and/or money.  In Value Stream Mapping, you’ll identify every activity currently required to produce your company’s product or service to the customer.  Each activity must then be assessed as to which of the following categories it falls into: 

(1) Value-add:  Activities which are required to produce what your customer wants to buy.  These are activities which the customer would gladly pay for, if they knew you were doing them behind the scenes.  By all means try to control these costs, but never at the risk of reducing the product’s value in the eyes of the customer.

(2) Non-Value-add:  These are activities which the customer would not want to pay for, but which are required for legal, regulatory, or business reasons.  These also include supporting administrative functions such as HR and Accounting.  They may not directly lead to your customer’s desired product, but just try to run your business without them!  Certainly try to reduce these costs, but you will not be able to eliminate them outright.

(3) Waste:  These are activities which the customer would not want to pay for, and no one else should either.  In Lean Thinking Generates Value — And Profits, I give examples of the “Seven Deadly Wastes”.  Eliminate these immediately if not sooner. 

Makes a lot of sense, but if it were easy, everyone would do it, right?  So how is Value Stream Mapping done?

(1) Start by mapping the existing process.  Map not only materials flow, but also paper flow and information flow.  Such maps often seem complicated and even intimidating at first glance, but once you get to know what the different symbols mean, it will start to make a lot of sense. 

(2) Assess the current process in terms of Value-add, Non-value-add, and Waste activities.  (In some cases, Non-value-add and Waste are binned together.)

(3) Develop a map of the streamlined future process, eliminating wasteful activities.  This is where the art and science come in, and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt can help.  Takt time, kaizen, kanban, and all those other concepts and techniques of Lean can be used individually or in combination to help you achieve this step. 

(4) Implement the future map. 

Value Stream Mapping is one of the key inputs to assessing how to streamline a given process.  Often once you have identified the costs and binned them into Value-add, Non-value-add, and Waste categories, the necessary process changes can seem to leap right off your computer monitor.  If you know the cost of the original process, and the cost of the streamlined process, the difference is the cost savings directly attributable to your project team’s efforts.

And that makes Value Stream Mapping a highly “valuable” tool for your career, too.

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Fishbone Diagram: Root Out Those Causes

Posted on28. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

The Fishbone Diagram

, also called the Ishikawa Diagram, was developed by quality management pioneer Kaoru Ishikawa.  It is also sometimes referred to as the Cause-&-Effect Diagram — because that’s what it focuses on. 

This is a tool used in brainstorming sessions during a Lean Six Sigma project.  It can be used in either the Analyze or Improve phase of the DMAIC problem-solving framework. 

 Why is it called the “Fishbone” Diagram?  Well, take a look.  Could it be called anything else? 

 The parts of the fishbone diagram are:

• The head of the fish contains the Effect, or Outcome, of a process.
• Horizontal branches contain Causes.  (Note the arrows, which indicate the causal relationship.) 
• These are usually divided into 4 – 6 standard categories, depending on the type of business and process under study. 
  • For Manufacturing, a common list of categories is:  People, Materials, Methods, and Machinery / Equipment.
  • For Service, the list might look like:  People, Policies, Procedures, and Machinery / Equipment.  
  • Personally, I like to add the categories of Environment and Measurement as well, bringing the total count up to 6.  
  • The fact is, you should not feel bound by any particular list of categories.  Use what works for your company.
• Sub-branches contain contributing reasons for each Cause.

What to put on the branches?  Well, here’s where brainstorming comes in.  To help guide your team’s brainstorming efforts, you can use the “5 Why’s” approach.  With the 5 Why’s, you keep on asking “Why” until you either identify the root cause, or run screaming out of the room.  (Just kidding.)  Usually, it takes only 5 Why’s — or fewer — to get to the root cause of a particular problem.

 If you have (or ever had) small children, you are familiar with this approach; you just didn’t know that’s what it was. 

“Mommy, why do I have to wear my seatbelt?”  (The first Why.)
“Because that’s the rule.”
“Why is it the rule?” (The second Why.)
“Because I want you to be safe.”
“But why do I need to be safe?”  (The third Why.)
“Because I don’t want you to be hurt if we ever have a car accident.”
“Why don’t you want me to be hurt?” (The fourth Why.)
“Because I love you!”  (Ah-hah!  Root cause, and we didn’t even get to the 5^th Why.) (Note, also, the desire at this point to run screaming from the room.)

Now, having gone through that process for every possible factor contributing to the presence of defects, we can map them onto the fishbone diagram.  This provides an excellent visual aid to avoid leaping to premature conclusions, and to make sure no key factors are missed.

The Fishbone diagram may seem simple, but putting it into practice can be harder than you might think. 

• It’s important to get the right team members / stakeholders into the brainstorming session. 
• It’s also important to manage the group dynamics, so that by the end of the process, all team members have taken ownership of the entire diagram.  You don’t want people remembering which idea was whose. 
• You may wish to break up the brainstorming activity into more than one session with a break in between.  The break can enable some good ideas or missed factors to bubble up to the surface of participants’ minds, which can help the later sub-sessions be more productive. 

In short, the Fishbone diagram can be a useful process improvement tool, helping teams to look beyond the obvious answers to the root causes of defects.

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Lean Management: The Art of Asking the Right Questions

Posted on26. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

How is Lean Management distinct from Lean Manufacturing and Lean Office?  If you have Lean Manufacturing, don’t you automatically have Lean Management?  If Lean is all about cutting out wasted time, then shouldn’t Lean Managers act quickly and decisively?  The faster a decision, the better — and more Lean — it must be, right?

Well, not exactly. 

How is Lean Management Different?

The difference between Lean Manufacturing / Lean Office and Lean Management is the same difference as between personal excellence and leadership. 

Lean Manufacturing and Lean Office are all about performing to high standards.  Lean Management, by contrast, is all about inspiring and enabling others to perform to equally high standards.  This is the mark of a true leader.  In the sense of inspiring and enabling excellence in others, all teachers are leaders, and all leaders are teachers.   

Consider a concert pianist honing his skills to the point where he can give a world-class performance.  Yet this same pianist might not be a very good teacher.  Why not?  He has achieved personal excellence of the highest order.  Shouldn’t that qualify him as an excellent teacher?  Not necessarily.  He may not relate well to beginners.  He may lack patience with those less skilled.  He may be a poor communicator.  In other words, he may not be able to inspire and enable others to achieve their own excellence. 

It’s all about leadership. 

Paradoxically, true leadership, the kind that inspires and enables fast, Lean production, does not necessarily come from quick decisions.  It’s not about finding fast answers, it’s about finding the right answers.  And you can’t find the right answers without asking the right questions. 

And to ask the right questions, it may take some time to assess, analyze, and apprehend the meaning of a given situation.  It takes trying, perhaps failing, and learning from that.

Lean Management means being free to fail?  What?  Wouldn’t that be wasteful?  Who wants to be wrong — and be seen to be wrong?  Don’t we all know someone (or know of someone) who has been fired for screwing up?  And now we’re supposed to believe that world-beating management should be given permission to fail?     

It may seem counterintuitive, but then didn’t the banishment of inventory stockpiles seem counterintuitive at first too?  How could a system that lacked the “padding” of a safety margin actually be more robust?  Yet that is the essence of Lean Manufacturing — and it has proven its worth. 

Lean Management will prove its worth too. 
 
You’re not allowed to learn from your failures because you’re not allowed to fail?  That just means you’re not allowed to be caught failing; no one is perfect.  Another way of saying that is, “Sending only good news upstairs.”  This is SOP in, well, just about any company you can think of.  Yet this is a recipe for destroying the morale of your best workers, and giving your competition a chance to blindside you — and both of these contribute to driving your customers elsewhere. 

The proper role of true leadership — Lean Management — is to find and expose your company’s problems, before your competition can exploit them to your detriment.  To ask the right questions.  To learn from failure.  To find an answer that you’re sure is the right one — not just the fastest one.  When you can do that — then you’ll know you’re a leader.  And your company will be one too.

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Lean Office: The Next Frontier

Posted on26. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

Okay, you get the whole Lean Manufacturing thing.  But what the heck is Lean Office? 

The Lean Office Concept

Lean Manufacturing is starting to make sense to you.  Though a part of you really wants to hang onto that safety margin of inventory “just in case,” your data-driven brain accepts that Inventory Equals Waste.  Fine.  You understand the value of Lean Thinking as it relates directly to what you sell, even if that’s a service and not a widget.

But can you really apply Lean Thinking to your company’s administrative functions?  HR?  Accounts Payable?  IT? 

None of these departments are directly related to producing what your customers want to buy, yet it’s difficult to imagine how a modern company could operate without them.  It’s even more challenging to imagine how to observe, map, and quantify the value streams associated with them.  And changing these departments will be more difficult still, since these areas are even more strongly influenced by local company culture and “the human factor” than is the manufacturing environment.

So how does Lean Office work?  First of all, let’s be clear that Lean Office is not about cutting people or departments.  It’s about getting the most value out of the people and departments you have. 

The main idea is the same as in all Lean efforts:  Cutting out wasted effort or time. 

In the office environment, that could be the time files or other work items spend sitting around waiting for someone to work on them.  That’s the entire process of getting useless rubber-stamp signatures for some routine purchase.  It’s having a staff meeting on Wednesday mornings just because there’s always been a staff meeting on Wednesday mornings — even though half the time no agenda is prepared, the boss is late, and there aren’t even any doughnuts. 

Lean Office follows the same principles as Lean Manufacturing, but you may have to get a little creative to figure out what some of these terms mean in the office environment.

For instance, in an Accounts Payable office, the “customer” could actually be seen as the supplier who is waiting to be paid, the “product” is invoices, and the goal of “going Lean” would be to reduce the number of days an invoice goes unpaid. 

In an HR department, the “customers” are other departments internal to the company; the “product” is willing and qualified workers; and the metric for success of your Lean efforts might be to reduce the number of days an open position goes unfilled.

To succeed at Lean Office, you need to map the current process in terms of flow.  How does paper flow (or the equivalent in electronic forms)?   How does information flow, and is it the same as the paper flow or not?  (If not, think hard about the value of some of those forms.)  Map the value-add and non-value-add costs. 

Once again, the Lean principles are:

(1) Specify value — as the customer sees it, however the customer is defined for your function.

(2) Map the value stream, identifying value-add and non-value-add costs — and minimize the latter.

(3) Make the remaining process steps flow.  This usually means empowering the workforce, pushing down responsibility for a decision to the right level in the organization.

(4) Let the customer pull the desired product through the production process.  Don’t do work until someone has asked for it.

(5) And finally, don’t stop there.  Pursue perfection through continual improvement.  In other words, the job is never done.

Now look around your workspace.  Can you put your hands on any piece of information you need in under one minute?  Could somebody else walking into your office find the needed info in under one minute if you weren’t there?  

If not, then we apply the 5S process to HQ: Sort, Straighten, Sweep, Standardize, and Sustain.  The goal is, “A place for everything and everything in its place.”  

The fact is, if you’ve already achieved Lean production (whether of a service or a widget), there’s no need to let flabby practices in the office keep you from world domination.  You owe it to yourself to give Lean Office your best shot.

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Lean Manufacturing: No Muss, No Fuss

Posted on26. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

What is Lean Manufacturing all about?   (We’ll get to the closet later.) 

Lean Manufacturing

is one of several related terms that describe similar systems.  Just-In-Time, World Class Manufacturing, Stockless Production, and Demand Flow Technology are a few of these other terms.  Broadly, all of these concepts focus on doing the bare minimum necessary to produce the product required by customers. 

In other words, don’t order extra inventory and then have to pay for facilities to store it and people to manage it.  Don’t over-design a product and spend countless engineering and design hours figuring out how to shoehorn 10 pounds of sand into a 5-pound bag.  (All the customer wants is 5 pounds, and they won’t pay more for 10.)  These things are wasteful.  The customer won’t pay for them; why should your company? 

Lean Manufacturing had its roots in Henry Ford’s system of mass production.  Ford was one of the first and most famous industrialists who paid careful attention to work flow and process standardization.  Before Ford, automobiles were an extreme luxury, since it cost so much for craftsmen to produce each one by hand.  Ford’s express goal was to create a market for the automobile.  He achieved this by reducing per-unit production costs and paying his factory workers enough so that they could afford to buy the cars they were building.  It worked.  America’s love affair with the automobile was born.

After World War II, Japanese auto producer Toyota admired the American system of production.  But Toyota’s leadership realized they did not have the capital or other resources needed to implement a process as centralized as Ford’s.  So Toyota set about trying to streamline everything related to producing cars.  The result was a system that became famous in the early 1990’s, in part as a result of a book entitled “The Machine That Changed the World” by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos. 

So what are these revolutionary principles?    

(1) Specify value — as the customer sees it.

(2) Map the value stream, identifying value-add and non-value-add costs — and get rid of the latter.

(3) Make the remaining process steps flow.  This usually means empowering the workforce, pushing down responsibility for a decision to the right level in the organization.

(4) Let the customer pull the desired product through the production process.  Never build in advance of an order.

(5) And finally, don’t stop there.  Pursue perfection through continual improvement.  In other words, the job is never done.

In order for your production facility to support this approach, it is often the case that the physical plant must be transformed.  Lean Manufacturing prescribes the Five S process to achieve this: Sort, Straighten, Sweep, Standardize, and Sustain.  These actions can be taken in relation to the inventory but also to tools and equipment.  The goal is that age-old saying, “A place for everything and everything in its place.”  If you don’t need it — don’t hang onto it.  If you do need it, make sure you know where it is, and whether or not it’s in working order. 

So, what about that closet?  Well, the first three S’s are accomplished fairly easily, often in one major effort — like spring-cleaning a closet.  But without the last two S’s, it doesn’t take much time before things start to look like the same cluttered mess they were before.  Do you already have a stock of Widget A?  They didn’t get put where they were supposed to be, and something else got put there instead, so you don’t know.  Well, you need Widget A to produce your output, so you order more.  Bingo!  Wasted inventory, wasted time, wasted money. 

Lean Manufacturing requires constant discipline to avoid slipping back into pre-lean, wasteful habits.  The price of Lean is constant vigilance.  But if you’re successful in maintaining that vigilance — you can be a world-beater.

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Six Sigma Master Black Belt: The Expert’s Expert

Posted on24. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

Have you ever wondered what exactly a Master Black Belt does?  And how that differs from what a regular Six Sigma Black Belt does? 

I’ve got a really simple visual here to help make it clear:

 Think Yoda. 

Master Black Belt vs Master Yoda

The Six Sigma Master Black Belt trains Black Belts.  Often, he or she selects candidates for Black Belt training.  When a problem exceeds the skills and knowledge of regular Black Belts, they turn to the Master BB for guidance and help.  The Master Black Belt must take a broader view, with responsibility for the overall progress of Six Sigma in a given company. 

You have to admit, that’s a lot like what Yoda does for the Jedi Knights.  Well, okay, without the light saber.  (They’ve got some really fabulous spreadsheets and Powerpoint slides, though.)

Kidding aside, Master Black Belts are crucial players in the successful implementation of a company’s Six Sigma program.  They provide the overarching vision for the program.  They recruit, train, lead, and guide the Black Belts who will make an impact on their employer.  They help select and champion high-impact projects.  They are responsible for ensuring the integrity of statistical methods and tollgates. 

In other words, in a medium-to-large company, a successful Six Sigma program could not be implemented without them.  And they provide the leadership and expertise for most small-to-medium Six Sigma consulting and training companies.  

 How can you become a Master BB? 

 For starters, you’ll need to be a certified Six Sigma Black Belt.  Many (if not most) training companies require you to have led a minimum of three successful Six Sigma projects as a certified Black Belt before you may enter their MBB course. 

Why so picky?  Well, before you can be an effective consultant, solving the knottiest problems of other Black Belts, it’s pretty clear that you’ll need to have solved a fair number of problems of your own.  (Think Yoda again.  More experienced than Luke.)

In many large companies, certified Black Belts will work full-time on Six Sigma projects for eighteen months to three years.  Their companies may then sponsor them to pursue training as a Master Black Belt.  It is also possible to pursue Master-level training independently.  However, it is quite expensive; where training companies will even provide their prices on their websites, I couldn’t find any below $4,500.  Also, the on-line training programs, which have so helped to bring the cost within reach for Green Belts and Black Belts, have recently been rolled out at the MBB level through the Pyzdek Institute.

Master-level training involves more advanced statistical techniques than were taught in standard Black Belt training.  Also, additional training in Lean techniques may be provided, as well as in leadership skills and the art of being a successful change agent. 

All in all, the Master Black Belt holds a pretty substantial amount of responsibility in his or her hands.  But if you think you’re up to the challenge, you’ll also have the opportunity to make an equally substantial impact on your company, and on the careers of those you’ll lead.

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Lean Thinking Generates Value — And Profits

Posted on24. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

The Value of Lean Thinking

What does the “Lean” in “Lean Six Sigma” stand for? And what is “Lean Thinking”?

Both Lean and Six Sigma have their roots in manufacturing process improvement. Over the past decade or so, they have been integrated into a combined approach that has been applied to the full range of business processes, not just manufacturing.

The term “Lean” originated in “Lean manufacturing.” This is a manufacturing method which was famously pioneered by Toyota, as documented in the 1990 book “The Machine That Changed the World” by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos. Womack and Jones later released another influential book titled “Lean Thinking” (1996) which sets forth the basic principles of the lean model of business.

The core concepts of Lean could be summed up as: (1) Add nothing but value. (2) Value is in the eyes of the customer. (3) Therefore, the enterprise should be oriented along lines that enable the customer’s needs to “pull” raw materials, services, and information along the most-efficient, least-wasteful path or “flow.” At the end of this flow, the customer has received the product or service he or she wanted.

Clear enough, but what does a Lean Thinking company look like in practice? And can it work in a non-manufacturing firm?

In the simplest terms, a Lean organization has a short order-to-delivery cycle. The shorter the cycle, the leaner the company.

It doesn’t really matter what the customer is ordering. It could be rapid transportation to a distant city (airline tickets). It could be showerheads (Home Depot). It could be the opportunity to buy or sell something at the best possible price (eBay). A sense of connectedness to friends and family (Twitter). In all cases, the customer wants to obtain something that he or she values, and some organization is trying to deliver whatever that something is.

What adds value to the order-to-delivery cycle? The activities of receiving the order, preparing the product or service to fulfill the order, and delivering the order.

What does not add value? In other words, what would customers not be willing to pay for, if they knew it was going on behind the scenes? How about stockpiling raw materials to enable the company to produce someone else’s order (inventory)? How about not having enough capacity to fulfill the customer’s order right away (backlog)? (A non-manufacturing example of this: Overbooking an airline flight.) How about an order entered incorrectly? Or a lost shipment? What if a particular webmail service kept crashing your web browser whenever you tried to check your email?

Lean Thinking is a mindset that doesn’t so much seek to avoid wasteful mistakes in a step as to eliminate a wasteful step entirely.

For example, if an order is entered incorrectly, the Lean approach would ask, “Do we need to do order-entry at all?” Maybe if the customer orders on-line, then we automate the order-entry process and eliminate that wasteful step in the process. On the other hand, maybe your particular customers want to “be taken care of” and would resent an expectation that they “do it themselves.” If that is the case, then, yes, we must continue to do order-entry and moreover, it should provide a personal touch to these customers. This is why understanding the customer’s wants and needs is so central to designing Lean processes. One customer’s trash is another one’s treasure — and you need to know which customer you’re dealing with.

In embracing Lean Thinking, a company is dedicated to discovering what their customers want, and providing it to them in a way that adds nothing but value — that the customers will pay for. By doing so, the company will create value (profits) for itself as well.

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Lean Six Sigma: What Is It?

Posted on24. Apr, 2009 by carolesf.

Lean and Six Sigma

Most people in business today have heard the term “Six Sigma.”  Over the past few years, though, we’ve also begun to see the term “Lean Six Sigma.”  You may be wondering, “What exactly is Lean Six Sigma?  Is it different from “regular” Six Sigma?”

Originally, Lean and Six Sigma were seen as competing methods.  The Lean approach focused on minimizing lead time for a given process, seeking speed and efficiency.  Six Sigma focused on minimizing variability in a given process, seeking to minimize minimizing defects in output.  Followers of each approach were quick to point out the shortcomings of the other method.  A Lean process could still produce poor-quality outputs; and a Six Sigma process may not necessarily have been faster or more efficient than the process it replaced.

But why should you have to choose between quality and speed?  Shouldn’t the ideal business process result in both quality and speed?

This realization led business leaders to see Lean and Six Sigma as the complementary tools that they are.  Using the integrated Lean Six Sigma approach, a company can improve both efficiency and quality — at the same time.

Sound good?  Broadly speaking, here’s how Lean Six Sigma works.

The basic problem-solving framework is known as DMAIC:  Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. 

Define & Measure: 

Identify the process and problem we want to work on.  Then, measure the extent of the problem. 

For the target process, the Black Belt leading the project will produce a an As-Is map.  The idea here is to capture the process as it currently exists.  Not as it was designed to be.  Not as we wish it could be.  But as it is.  (This is typically quite an eye-opening exercise.)  The value stream map identifies costs in the process. 

Analyze

Next, the Black Belt will want to capture the voice of the customer, to identify issues that are critical to quality — in the customer’s eyes.  Remember, the customer is the key stakeholder in any business process.  If the business doesn’t keep its customers happy, none of the other stakeholders will be around for long.  Therefore, the costs in the value stream map can be put into one of two bins from the customer’s perspective:  Either value-add or non-value-add costs.  In other words, ask yourself this question about any of the identified process costs:  “Will the customer be willing to pay for this?”  If YES, it’s a value-add cost.  If NO — get rid of it; it’s a non-value-add cost. 

Here I want to remind you of something I said in an earlier post:  Defects are a waste that the customer does not want to pay for.  This fact illustrates why the Lean and Six Sigma methods of process improvement, in reality, work so well together:  Both approaches zero in on this point. 

Improve:

Now that the Lean Six Sigma team has identified areas of wasted cost, wasted time, and/or sources of defect-producing variability, we can revisit the process map.  Now we define what the process should look like. 

Control:

The team’s work doesn’t end with a new and improved process map.  We must also consider how to avoid a similar problem in the future, and how to recognize it more quickly if it does occur.  In other words, we must ensure that we can maintain control over this new process as it is moved from the Powerpoint slide into the real world.  This is the Control phase of the DMAIC framework. 

If the Lean Six Sigma team has done its job well, the new process should be shorter, faster, less costly, and more effective than the old process.

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