Lean Six Sigma -- Its Evolving Best Practices and Issues

This past December, Terra Vanzant Stern published the third edition of Lean Six Sigma: International Standards and Global Guidelines. Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is designed to accommodate global challenges and constraints by capitalizing on Six Sigma and Lean Thinking, and her book assumes that the overall goal of operational excellence is to ensure that organizational tasks and activities are being performed to the best of their process capabilities. It defines continuous improvement as activities that support and empower environments to make flexible decisions that lead to ongoing improvement and effectiveness. It covers new global LSS standards, international implementation of process improvement programs,  new international LSS applications, and international LSS areas of competency.

When I spoke with Terra this month, I asked her: "What important updates are covered in this third edition of your book?” Here is her complete answer:

The updates included in this edition are crucial because I have taken Lean Six Sigma to new heights, incorporating cutting-edge updates and advancements that will leave you captivated. With a focus on enhancing change management and data governance programs, this edition is a game-changer for organizations seeking to optimize their processes and drive sustainable growth.

What sets this edition apart is its ability to seamlessly integrate process improvement methodologies with change management and data governance. We understand that these three pillars are essential for organizations to thrive in the current dynamic business landscape. By leveraging Lean Six Sigma principles, you can streamline your processes, drive efficiency, and achieve remarkable results.

Imagine a world where every process is optimized, every change is seamlessly implemented, and every data point is governed with precision. This vision becomes a reality with the help of the latest edition of this book. I have meticulously crafted a framework that empowers organizations to achieve operational excellence while ensuring compliance and data integrity.

But what truly makes this edition intriguing is the transformative power it holds. By embracing Lean Six Sigma, organizations can unlock their full potential and drive a culture of continuous improvement. From reducing waste and defects to enhancing customer satisfaction, the possibilities are endless.

With this third edition of the book, you surely discover how Lean Six Sigma can revolutionize your organization's process improvement, change management, and data governance programs. Embrace the power of Lean Six Sigma and unlock a world of endless possibilities.

The new edition of this book assists you as you embark on a journey toward operational excellence, enhanced change management, and impeccable data governance. It's time to revolutionize the way you do business.

What are your experiences with Lean Six Sigma initiatives? What issues and aspects do you feel should be incorporated as organizations change and evolve?

Reactive Improvement and Effective Daily Management

In December, Ross Kennedy published a book entitled Understanding, Measuring, and Improving Daily Management: How to Use Effective Daily Management to Drive Significant Process Improvement . This book explains the critical parts of a continuous improvement strategy to achieve operational excellence and where reactive improvement through effective daily management fits in.

During a recent conversation with Ross, I asked him: “What is reactive improvement and why aren’t more companies embracing it?” Here is his complete answer:

To achieve operational excellence, organizations need a continuous-improvement strategy that includes reactive improvement to ensure you have effective daily management, stable production, or work plan to minimize fire-fighting caused by unplanned changes and proactive Improvement to take you to your improvement vision of world-class performance. Unfortunately, many organizations get so focused on proactive improvement through capital projects or operational excellence initiatives such as Lean, Six Sigma, or Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), that they lose sight of the importance of reactive improvement and having a stable production or work plan.

Reactive improvement develops the capability and discipline within the organization to be able to rapidly recover from an event or incident that stops you from achieving your expected or target performance for the day, shift, or hour and most importantly, your ability to capture the learning and initiate corrective actions so that the event or incident will not re-occur anywhere across the organization.

As such, reactive improvement focuses on improving daily management through your daily review meetings, your information centers supporting the daily review meetings, and your problem-solving root cause analysis capability at all levels, especially at the frontline.There are seven key elements of reactive improvement that must work in concert for effective daily management: 

1. A supportive organization structure to support development of your frontline people so they have ownership and accountability for the performance of their area of responsibility. 
2. Effective frontline leaders to ensure everyone else in the leadership structure are not working down a level. 
3. Appropriate measures with expected targets that are linked to the site’s key success factors for operations to ensure goal alignment and are relevant for the focused areas. 
4. Structured daily review meetings to identify opportunities (problems/incidents) and monitor progress of their solution so they don’t happen again. 
5. Visual information centers that visually display daily and trending performance along with monitoring of actions to address problems/issues raised.
6. Frontline problem-solving root cause analysis capability across the site. 
7. Rapid sharing of learning capability across shifts, departments and the organization. 

What do think of Ross's overview of reactive improvement? Do you practice this technique in your company?

Do Misconceptions About Lean Cause Many Initiatives to Fail?

At conferences, in magazine articles, and in books, we often hear of the benefits that Lean initiatives provide to organizations' efficiency and general workplace culture, but the failure rates are never comprehensively analyzed. In August, Cordell Hensley published an interesting new book, Lean Misconceptions: Why Many Lean Initiatives Fail and How You Can Avoid the Mistakes, that sheds light on why more than half of performance-improvement initiatives fail to achieve desired results.When I spoke with Cordell last week, I asked him: "What are the common mistakes that cause Lean initiatives to fail?” Here's the answer he provided:

The focus on removing waste is fundamental within Lean, but it should not be the only objective when beginning on your journey. Many organizations think simple: Lean = less waste. While this is true, it is like saying the TARDIS is just a police telephone box.

For example, I am always surprised by how few have heard of MURA (unevenness) or MURI (overburden). These are as, or potentially more, important than MUDA (waste). These other two create waste; and if you don’t focus on removing unevenness and overburden, then your efforts to reduce waste will be in vain. 

In addition, while removing or reducing waste is fundamental within Lean, I argue that it is too easy to ignore or skip the objective of creating capability. I’m not talking about getting a few experts in or training your leadership team but actively engaging everyone in the thinking behind what you’re trying to do.

Lean provides the impetus for challenging the status quo, for seeing every process as something that can be improved, including the improvement process itself. Arguably, improving processes is the easy bit, and identifying waste is relatively simple as well, but it is the change of focus of every employee to solving problems that only comes from a shift in organizational thinking. It is a shift from an organization where employees do as they’re told by management to one where they are engaged in making things better, for everyone, including the shareholders.

Today’s leaders seem to want an answer to their problem that they can buy “off the shelf.” This doesn’t exist! There is no silver bullet or panacea  that can fix  problems or improve performance for every business. The results they seek are readily available, but it takes effort, it takes learning, it takes a shift in paradigms.

Lean has been around for several decades. It evolved from research on Toyota followed by the application by hundreds if not thousands of organizations and their consultants. Many users and “experts” within organizations, however,  have modified and adjusted the thinking to suit their immediate needs. This has created misconceptions within the industry and has denigrated the term to little more than a process improvement technique. 

This evolution has, in most cases, reduced the potential that organizations can achieve and has sadly been used to put many thousands of people out of work. Throughout my book, I try to demonstrate a different view of Lean and the culture desired to enable organizations not only to improve their processes and systems but also to create the capability to learn and adapt to the ever-changing world in which they operate.

What do you think of Cordell's perspective? Have you been involved in a Lean initiative that has not lived up to expectations? What do you think are its shortcomings?

Process Capability and Discrimination Ratios

During a recent phone call with Douglas Relyea, author of the book The Practical Application of the Process Capability Study: Evolving From Product Control to Process Control, he mentioned some common questions that arise when consulting with leaders or organizations. I'll let Doug take it from here:

"A company CEO asked me this question just this week, and I receive many similar questions in regard to gauges:

I understand the measurement process analysis (MPA) performed on product XYZ bond strength indicates we have a discrimination ratio (DR) of 2 which, if I understand correctly, means we can use this gauge to separate XYZ product into only two categories – good and bad. Should we buy a new gauge?

My answer is:

No. A low DR is not always a negative. A low DR can be the result of manufactured product that has very little variation as compared to the variation of the measurement process.

In this case, the product variation is 9 gms/in² and the measurement process variation is 47 gms/in². The customer specification is 400 gms/in², minus 50 gms/in² with no upper limit stipulated. The production records indicate the bond for this particular product is generally produced with a mean of 500 gms/in². This measurement process is suitable to tell good product from bad and, in this case, that is all that is required. "

Do you agree with Doug's assessment?