Tag: Six Sigma

Act and audit

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watercolor painting of still life

George Taninecz MPI Group(Courtesy of Guest Blogger George Taninecz, VP of research, The MPI Group)

Did you make any plans for change in 2018?

Even this early in the year , many such goals and resolutions have already been abandoned. Or, at least, they’re at severe risk of being discarded. These failures are often not due to lack of desire. Most people who make resolutions do so earnestly, trying in some way to improve their lives, careers, personalities, or communities.

And yet why is it so tough to stick with our resolutions?

One reason is that we often embark on unguided resolutions. We lack the mechanisms to measure and monitor our progress toward our end goal. We strive for a marathon without running a mile. Even  the most ambitious resolution has a fighting chance if accompanied by a system to break it down into incremental actions and outcomes.

To achieve a year-end result (usually some form of a lag measure tallied at the close of the year), we need intermediary metronomes to keep us pacing toward the sought-after ending (lead measures). If we’re looking to lose weight, our weekly frequency of exercise and daily intake of calories will likely predict the 12-month outcome long before the new year rolls around.

For example, I’ve dabbled in watercolors for decades and have a drawer of unfinished (and unappealing) paintings to prove it. When I told my friend Jack, a distinguished painter, about my inability to finish a work, he matter-of-factly said that I need to practice finishing. So, with a resolution to improve as a watercolorist, my plan is to finish a painting twice a month. With each finished painting, I should move closer to reaching my resolution.

Some improvements and some resolutions may only require a “just do it” approach — you don’t need a future-state map to put out a fire — but most require time and long-term effort. Here, we can take a cue from lean practitioners.

When pursuing strategic goals, lean organizations establish routine monitoring throughout their operations to understand lead performances on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. With a regularly scheduled cascade of meetings up and down  the organization, teams share and review this information, take corrective actions if necessary, and escalate problems beyond their control up to the next tier of meetings. It is an endless whirl of many connected PDCA cycles (plan/do/check/adjust) that keep all aligned on the end goals. These companies may not always achieve their yearly targets, but they’re rarely surprised when they don’t. We, too, can regularly review progress, as well as engage others in helping us to achieve our goals.

We also can’t underestimate the need to actually do something: merely tracking our path toward progress won’t cut it. In order to accomplish a goal or in some way change our behaviors, we also have to act. This necessary cycle of actions, audits, and outcomes reminded me of a homily I heard decades ago: A parishioner prays weekly to God to win the lottery. After years of disappointment and winless, he lashes out and asks why God would refuse him. The voice comes: “You need to buy a lottery ticket.”

If we regularly buy a ticket — i.e., do the work to change — and have the means to periodically check the results, we at least have a chance to win with our resolutions.

Poka-Yoke It: How mistake-proofing devices can prevent human error

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tailor

George Taninecz MPI Group(Courtesy of Guest Blogger George Taninecz, VP of research, The MPI Group)

While buying a pair of dress slacks recently, I was surprised to see the department manager using a mistake-proofing device to mark the pant length for tailoring. He placed an upside-down, Y-shaped tool on the floor and against the back of my pant leg.

At the top of the device, he marked a line on the trousers, which established the distance to the ground. Based on that line and the amount of break I wanted in the trousers, the tailor would know where to hem. Poka-yoke for pants.

Shigeo Shingo came up with the term “poka-yoke” (“mistake-proofing” or “inadvertent error prevention” in Japanese) in the 1960s when designing Toyota production processes that would not allow a human error to occur: “A poka-yoke device is an improvement in the form of a jig or fixture that helps achieve 100-percent acceptable product by preventing the occurrence of defects.”[1]

I first saw and used a poka-yoke device more than four decades ago. Every few years, my dad, who was a steelworker, would get 13 weeks of vacation. He often took this block of time during the summer to tackle a household project. In 1973, the job was to apply aluminum siding to our house. His crew was me, my brother, and one of my sisters (my other sister, who was an adult, missed out on the fun).

My dad set the bottom row of siding in place using a level and other means, taking his time to get it just right. Then, with the bottom row attached, each of us would grab our poka-yoke device, which was a piece of wood, shaped like an L. The short, horizontal leg matched the width of the bottom of the siding, and the top of the upright length established the vertical distance for the next piece of siding. We would push our devices against the attached siding and upward, rest the next piece of siding on top of the wood, and my dad would nail the perfectly located piece in place.

Even with the clever mistake-proofing tool, it still took a very long time for one adult and three teenagers to side a house. Fortunately, it also was the summer of the Watergate hearings. When the network broadcasts began, my dad would call it quits to watch. I still associate the southern drawl of Senator Sam Ervin, who headed the Senate Watergate Committee, with much-needed relaxation.

Since that summer of siding, I’ve seen a lot of poka-yokes:

  • In manufacturing plants, where devices prevent employees from reaching into machines and harming themselves or stop workers from selecting the wrong part or attaching a part in the wrong location or manner.
  • In buildings, where elevator doors won’t close if someone is between the doors, won’t open if the elevator is moving, or the elevator won’t move if the weight of individuals within the elevator exceeds a safe limit.
  • At my house, where the washer won’t run unless the door is closed, the mower won’t cut unless the safety bar is engaged, and the garage door won’t lower if a sensor indicates an object is in its way.

I wish mistake-proofing methods could be used for other, bigger problems and put an end to catastrophic outcomes. Imagine if you could apply a poka-yoke to prevent the suffering and dying of people simply because they cannot afford healthcare. Or to stop an evil assassin from stockpiling automatic weapons and killing dozens of unarmed civilians.

Maybe we can. Of course, how and where to apply the poka-yokes would require open, honest, and civil discourse. Real problem solving demands nothing less. Are we willing to try?

[1] Shigeo Shingo, translated by Andrew P. Dillon, A Study of the Toyota Production System, Productivity Press, New York, 1989.

Tips & tricks for implementing Lean/Six Sigma tools

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Lean manufacturing

(Courtesy of Guest Blogger Chris Adams MBA, Lean BB and Six Sigma BB)

Lean and Six Sigma have been methodologies I have used throughout my career, whether I knew them at that time by those names or not. Educated in Industrial and Operations Engineering “at that school up north,” The University of Michigan, and subsequently obtaining an MBA at The Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, I was fortunate enough to get the strict schooling behind me and then later obtained my Lean Black Belt through the corporate Lean office of Emerson Electric in St. Louis and my Six Sigma Black Belt through Lorain County Community College via Dan Sommers who is a Six Sigma Black Belt alumni from GE Lighting.

The vast majority of my experience with Lean and Six Sigma methodologies has come through the manufacturing world. So, the first tip I would propose is to start with the Lean Journey 5S (or sometimes companies choose to use 6S to call out safety separately) if you and your organization have the wherewithal and commitment. Instituting the rigors of 5S and then maintaining are definitely a place where good standard work and an audit process pay off.

But, many an organization is too impatient to allow for the “cost” of 5S and the, sometimes, soft-cost savings to be returned. So, my second tip, Value Stream Mapping is still the way to make the current state be documented and understood as well as provide for the solid basis on which future-state Value Stream Maps can drive the profitability of an organization in the right direction.

My third tip is to use, sooner rather than later, the Value Stream Mapping process to understand back to the suppliers’ supplier and forward to the customers’ customer. I have been with organizations that have been successful in implementing and working with their suppliers and customers as a win-win in the value chain.

The fourth tip is to have a solid foundation for the process used to implement project- or process-based change. In my last two roles, I have been fortunate enough to work with organizations that were committed enough to the process of leading change that Policy Deployment (or Strategy Deployment or X-matrix) were truly practiced. An organization that waterfalls its top three to five main corporate objectives to the associate on the floor really understands what teamwork is all about.

My fifth and final tip is that, although my experience (and to this point) a significant amount of the use of Lean and Six Sigma tools have come through the manufacturing world, service industries are a hotbed where these tools can be more universally applied. In my personal experience as a volunteer at one of the most respected hospital systems in the world, we’ve learned that a process is a process and can be improved.