Achieving 99.9% quality sounds pretty good. But if we accepted that 99.9% at Heathrow airport, it would mean two unsafe plane landings per day. Lean Six Sigma teaches us that our goal should always be to strive for zero defects.
I have recently obtained the Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and it drove home just that. Whilst most of the enabling tools for change management, process mapping and problem resolution where not new to me, it was revealing to learn how these can be effectively used in combination with statistical measuring tools (such as control charting to determine how well a process is performing).
Some of the obvious Lean Six Sigma truths are:
- Focussing and improving something that is not a constraint does not improve the overall system, so the trick is to concentrate particularly on the bottlenecks.
- The same is true for waste in all of its forms. It needs to be eliminated or reduced (e.g. waiting times, unneccessary processing of non-value adding steps, overproduction, inventory, defective products or flawed services, unnecessary transportation or motion).
- From the above it is clear that both process variation and process speed should get attention: time is money and quality matters.
- At the end of the day there is no win if all the process improvements do not produce what the customer wants. The "Voice of the Customer" is key and should provide the pull for the end to end value stream to be created.
Achieving all these tough targets is only possible with strong leadership from the top and by empowering employees in effective teamworking.
From Experience I would say that focus is also extremely important: avoid activity overload as it would create too much work in progress with little overall impact. Disciplined project selection based on value potential is required.
Marina Dominicus
Mobile: 07803 888854
Email: info@madux.co.uk
February 2012
