Business improvement has always employed many different tools and methods. Lean and Six Sigma tools mutually support each other:
Lean focuses on reducing waste and creating flow whilst Six Sigma focuses on reducing variation and defects.
If your process is lean and process variation is high it will prevent flow and increase costs.
If your process variation is low, poor flow increases costs.
Deploying Lean Six Sigma together, reduces delays, defects and costs increasing profit.
Lean tools
5S
5S is a tool to organize the workplace reducing clutter, the mantra being a place for everything and everything in its place.
The English names for the acronyms are Sort, Set, Sweep, Standardise and Sustain.
5 Whys
5 Whys simply ask why five times to get to the root cause of a problem
eg The marble on the Jefferson state memorial is deteriorating?
Why?
They are washing the Pidgeon excrement off with detergents.
Why?
The Pidgeon’s come to eat the spiders.
Why?
The spiders come to eat the midges
Why?
Midges attracted by flood lights on monument (Root Cause)
Activity Mapping/ Value Stream Mapping
Reviewing the process and material delivery systems for waste and bottlenecks in the flow.
Setup Reduction
Setup Reduction and Changeover Analysis
7 Wastes
7 Wastes looking at the wastes of Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Over-processing, Overproduction, Defects + People Skills.
Product Family Sets
This tool groups common processes and steps for different product families. A review of the factory layout reduces the seven wastes.
Moments of Truth
Customer visits provide valuable opportunities for improvements. Often they will observe issues hidden within the business culture.
Six Sigma Tools
Design For Six Sigma
Key characteristics of the design are analyse from two view points:
- Critical To Quality features identified from the customer perspective.
- The other perspective looks at failures using PFMEA and DFMEA adding extra requirements to avoid issues.
Transfer functions derived for Key Characteristics. Control factors are selected and monitored using statistical process control. There are several tools used for identifying control factors. examples are:
- Design of experiments
- Regression
- Correlation
- Hypothesis testing
- Scatter Diagrams
- CNX diagrams
- Ishikawa Diagrams
- Brainstorming
- Control Charts
- Histograms
- Pareto Charts
Six Sigma Process Improvement
The other strand to Six Sigma is Process improvements using variation management and problem solving.
Many of these tools are listed above within the DMAIC framework.
Six Sigma Improvement Projects
Six Sigma Projects are usually scoped by the senior management team and Black Belts.
Black Belts are full time act as mentors and coaches for Green belts running the projects part time with their own teams. The projects usually follow the Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control process. Projects are reviewed at each phase to remove any issues.
I can assure you that the best savings can be made using the combined methods.
