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A major utility company that leveraged its improvement project selection criteria for business results used the right combination of lean tools and Six Sigma to solve a problem with respect to third-party billing. Challenged with improving the billing process, eliminating the defect and retrieving lost revenue, the company assembled a team consisting of a lean Six Sigma Black Belt from finance, a Green Belt from the pole yard, a pole yard foreman and various yard personnel. One of the first steps was a kaizen workshop where the current state was documented through a series of process maps. Next, waste and nonvalue-added activities in the current state were identified. From that information, the team worked to redesign a more ideal state. At that stage, specific lean tools such as one-piece flow, 5S, visual control, control point standardization and error proofing were used. Proving that Six Sigma can be equally effective outside the manufacturing arena, the company also used tools such as FMEA and hypothesis testing to understand, measure and systematically reduce the variations in the billing process. The result? A $1.4 million revenue enhancement.
Another example is that of a food company that wanted to improve its processing. Like the utility company, this organization was focused on business results and used both lean tools and Six Sigma to realize them. For the Six Sigma initiative, one of its suppliers even loaned it a Black Belt to help establish baseline data on its equipment.
This company was faced with a regulation that required it to completely purge, clean and check its system every 72 hours to test for bacterial growth before running production again. This cleaning process was taking too long, chewing up capacity and resulting in back orders and quality issues. The challenge was to reduce the 10-hour cleaning cycle time without sacrificing the quality of the product or equipment.
The company mobilized the key people involved with the process and attacked the problem like a NASCAR racing team pit crew. The crew was coached by a lean Six Sigma Black Belt using process mapping, lean layout, visual management with digital cameras and process capability analysis in the product packing area. Cycle time was reduced by more than two hours, and improvement in the overall capability of the packaging line equaled an additional increase in annual production of more than 30 percent. All backlog was eliminated.
Lean systems thinking Chances are youve never sat on a two-legged stool, and with good reason: Its tough to do when you cant find the right balance.
Balancing lean and Six Sigma in your operation might give you the best of both worlds, but not the best of all worlds. Without a third essential component, real success doesnt have a leg to stand on (pardon the pun). The cultural transformation brought on by lean leadership and lean systems thinking within an organization provides the long-term stabilityor balancenecessary to sustain your quality improvement efforts.
Whatever combination of lean tools and Six Sigma youre using, when it comes to quality improvement, they work. This is good news, but its not the whole story.
The real Aha moment for companies comes when lean systems thinking is factored into the quality improvement equation. Lean systems thinking is about empowering people to drive change. This is accomplished by following these five key principles:
Directly observe work as activities, connections and flows
Systematically eliminate waste
Establish high agreement of both what and how
Systematically solve problems
Create a learning organization
The fundamental message here is simple, yet not universally understood. No technique, tool or methodology alone can improve a process or system and sustain that improvement long-term. It takes lean systems thinkers to successfully implement lean tools and drive Six Sigma change.
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