Lean Six Sigma
Lean Six Sigma
Lean Six Sigma
Part - I
Six Sigma
1) Bill Smith coined the term “Six Sigma” after he used an improvement process
for his company Motorola.
2) A sigma or standard deviation is a measure of variation that measures the
reveals the average difference between any one item and overall average of
larger population of items.
3) It is represented as “s”.
4) Formula for this is :
1) DEFINE:
As under Define, we describe the problem. One major output from Define
is the Improvement Charter. It is an agreed document describing the
purpose and goals of an improvement team.
a. Under Improvement Charter:
A high-level business case providing an explanation of
why undertaking the project is important.
A problem statement defining the issue to be resolved.
A goal statement describing the objective of the project.
The project scope defining the parameters and identifying
any constraints.
The CTQs specifying the problem from the customer’s
perspective. Unless you already have the CTQs, these
might not be known until the Measure phase.
Roles identifying the people involved in and around the
project, expectations of them and their responsibilities. The
improvement charter forms a contract between the
members of the improvement team, and the champion or
sponsor.
Milestones summarising the key steps and provisional
dates for achieving the goal.
Tools like affinity and interrelationship diagrams can be used but
mainly in DMADV.
b. Creating and affinity diagram, follow these rules:
i. Use one idea per sticky note
ii. Use statements rather than questions
iii. Write clearly
iv. Don’t write in upper case as lower case words are easier
v. Avoid one word statements
vi. Include a noun and verb in each statement
vii. Don’t write an essay
Once everyone has finished writing their sticky notes, maintain the silence and place
them on the wall. Move the notes into appropriate themes or clusters. Finally,
give each theme or cluster a title describing its content. Ensure that each title
provides enough description; doing so is helpful for when you move into the
interrelationship diagram.
An interrelationship diagram identifies the key causal factors or drivers for your
programme or project, by enabling you to understand the relationships between
the themes or clusters. In looking at the different pairs of clusters you’re trying to
see if a cause and effect type of relationship exists, so does ‘this’ have to be
done before ‘that’, or does ‘this’ drive ‘that’.
Interrelationship Diagram
Affinity Diagram
2) Measure: Same as defined
3) Analyse: Same as defined
4) Improve:
After analysing the root causes, we begin to generate some
improvement ideas. It involves three phase:
a. Generate ideas about possible solutions: Solution should
address the problem and its cause.
b. Select the most appropriate solution: After generating the
improvement ideas, select the one which solves the major
criteria of your problem.
c. Plan and test the solution: Carrying a solution with detailed
planning is likely to be helpful.
5) Control:
The main purpose of the Control phase is to make the customer
actually feel the improvement as per the CTQs. A control plan can be:
At the end of every DMAIC phase, a review should be done, it should be done in
the form of a tollgate. At the end pf every phase, the improvement team leader
should conduct this in order to check that you have conducted the phase properly
and to review the output from it. Asking questions like:
How are things going?
Are we on course?
What have we discovered?
What went well?
What can we conclude?
Part – II
The concept of PEMME applies almost on every routine of ours. A simple diagram of
PEMME can be:
SIPOC model helps in identifying your customer and the outputs they need. The
SIPOC model is defined as:
1) Supplier: The people providing you with the input needed to carry out the
process are the suppliers. The external customer is also considered as a type
of supplier when he send you enquiries. In short, all those people bringing
information to the company for the process are considered to be suppliers.
2) Input: All the items that are being brought in by the suppliers are considered
to be inputs.
3) Process: Process defines the steps at high level.
4) Output: Things provided to the internal and external consumers that meet
their CTQs are termed as outputs.
5) Customers: The internal and external customer are are the customers.
Chapter – 4
Understanding your Customer Needs
The CTQs are the vital elements in Lean Six Sigma helping in meeting the customer
requirements. The voice of customers (VoC) help us understanding the CTQs.
The Kano model developed by Professor Kano at University of Tokyo helps us in
understanding the consumer requirements. It has three main categories:
1) Must-bes: These are some of the requirements that a customer does not
want to spell out because these are so must and obvious that one understand
it on its own. This will not increase the customer satisfaction. These are the
requirements a customer is already expecting.
2) One Dimensional: These are referred as the satisfiers as they relate to the
product feature, delivery service or both. The more these are met, the more
satisfaction it provides to the customers.
3) Delighters: Under this, a customer is delighted by something we’ve done and
his satisfaction will increase even if some of the elements haven’t been
delivered.
Such three behaviours are immutable. They can take each other’s behaviour
according to the changing time span. Some segments to study your customer are:
✓ Industry ✓ Age
✓ Size ✓ Gender
✓ Spend ✓ Socio-economic factors
✓ Geographical location ✓ Frequency of purchase/use
✓ End use ✓ Impact/opinion leader
✓ Product characteristics ✓ Loyalty
✓ Buying characteristics ✓ Channel
✓ Price/cost sensitivity ✓ Technology
Advantages Disadvantages
1. Flexibility 1) Costly
Focus Group
Focus group is interviewing 6-10 people at the same time. This interview generally
last for 2-3 hours. The main purpose of this group is to identify to capture new ideas
and evaluate the product/service or test new ideas on the customers.
Critical to Quality (CTQ) Requirements
CTQs should always be written down in the measurable form.
There are two types of process maps: the deployment flowchart and the value
street map. These maps are built on high level SIPOC diagram.
Before drawing any kind of process maps, one should visit the workplace (Gemba)
and see that what is happening there.
Process Stapling is the best way to understand the chain of events and the process.
It is simply taking a customer order and walking it through the required steps, step by
step and you go to various processes where the order goes. Doing this helps in
understanding some of the questions like “what happens, who does what and why,
how, where and when they do it.” Process stapling helps in the improvement when
you start understanding the processes.
Spaghetti Diagram
A spaghetti diagram helps us in linking the activities of workplace.
Everything is labelled and the linking threads tells us about the distance we cover
while reaching other process. This can help in identifying the waste and can help in
better arrangement of the workplace. Some other things for better performances can
be:
1) Painting a picture of process: This is not done for official bases, but for your
own self for the better understanding of what you see on the Gemba.
2) Keeping things simple: Rather than making things complicated, it should be
done in a simpler way so that they can be understandable by everyone.
Things can be labelled like circle for start process, square for steps and
diamond for decision making.
3) Developing a deployment flowchart: Such a chart helps in determining who
is involved in the process.
4) Seeing value in a value stream map: It is an addition or alternative to the
deployment chart. This chart shows al the value-creating task and the non-
value creating task. Value map need some steps while drawing:
a. Identify the process according to the start and end
b. Set-up a small analysis team
c. Go to the Gemba
d. Draw a process map of material in the whole value stream
e. Identify the performance data you need to know
f. Collect data for each step
g. Add arrows to show the information flow
h. Add an overall timeline to show the average cycle for an item
Part III
Assessing Performance
Chapter 6 - Gathering Information
Managing by facts is one of the key principle of Lean Six Sigma. We need accurate
data to make the right decision in life. Many organisations sometimes focus on
wrong data which is not required and they waste time in measuring that data.
Sometimes the data maybe right but is presented in the wrong way that it is difficult
to interpret. Effective data collection involves five step:
1) Agree the objectives and goals linking to the key outputs from your processes
that seek to meet the CTQs.
2) Develop operational definitions and procedures that help ensure everyone is
clear about what’s being measured and why.
3) Agree ground rules to ensure that you collect valid and consistent data.
4) Collect the data.
5) Carry on collecting the data and identify ways to improve your approach.
Sampling is used to when it is too difficult or too expensive to collect and analyse
data. Process Sampling is used to measure, analyse and control the process. Two
types of process sampling are: Systematic sampling is taking the sampling of every
third or tenth item or every 45 minutes. Sub-group sampling is taking the sample of
some particular number of goods every day.
Population Sampling is looks at the population to study the customer base or else
something which is already been processed.
Confidence Interval shows the range that are possible for the analysis of your
sample. Precision is half the width of confidence interval.
Chapter 7 – Presenting Your Data
2. One should always think from the customer point of view in order to stand at par
with the CTQs.
a. Over-Production
b. Waiting
c. Transportation
d. Over-Processing
e. Inventory
f. Motion
g. Defects/Corrections
1. The Five Ss’ aims to provide tools and materials we need to do the job only
when we need them. It helps in leading to the more safe and pleasant working
environment. The Five S are:
a. Sort: It organises the tools on the basis of frequently, occasionally,
never etc. This prevents the chaos to be created in the working
environment.
b. Straighten: This means straightening things up that are used
frequently.
c. Scrub: This includes keeping things clean, tidy and appropriately
maintained.
d. Systemise: This involves designing a simple way of working so that
tools and information stays sorted, straightened and scrubbed.
e. Standardise: It is sticking to the system every day and keep doing it.
3. Using a Visual Management helps understanding the process and know the
tasks are being carried out and storing the things properly.
House of Quality Room 1 – Customer Needs: Before reaching to the QFD stage,
we have to identify and segment the customer needs from the customer research
done by us. The collected information is just represented in the form of CTQs.
House of Quality Room 2 – Prioritising Needs and Competitive Comparison:
After that, the CTQs are prioritised in the form of importance. In designing phase,
you must understand the priorities from customer point of view. Also, customer
should be asked to rate us according to the competition as this will help us to
improve or redesign our product.
House of Quality Room 3 – Characteristics and Measures: Under this, we move
from ‘WHAT’ to ‘HOW’ of the customer requirements. This studies the basis on
which we have to measure the CTQs.
House of Quality Room 4 – Relationships: In this, we pick CTQs from room 1 and
characteristics and measures from room 3 in order to relate the WHAT and HOW.
House of Quality Room 5 – Competitive Benchmark: Benchmarking means
looking both inside and outside the organisation in order to see how well others are
doing in similar products/services as yours and how BEST PRACTICE organisation
provide theirs product/services.
House of Quality Room 6 – Target and Limits: In this, we set goals and targets
against the measures and characteristics of Room 3.
House of Quality Room 7 – Correlation: This room is also known as the roof. It
looks at the impact of each measure on the CTQs and how they affect each other.
We have to assess the impact of each measure whether it is increasing, decreasing
or hitting the target CTQs.
Part V - Deploying Lean Sigma
Chapter 13 – Leading the Deployment
1. Successful deployment of Lean Six Sigma is done by Doing the right work,
Doing the work right and Creating the right environment.
2. Dong the right work includes strategic alignment, project selection and
managing by fact. It ensures that project is focused towards right issues and
is linked towards your business objectives.
3. Doing the work right includes Lean Six Sigma tools and methods,
programme management, project management and process management. It
ensures that project runs effectively, using good quality people, applying
sound management techniques and many more.
4. Creating the right environment includes leadership behaviour, effective
sponsorship, mentoring, coaching, effective teamwork and resourcing.
1. Kaizen means the change for the better. It is associated with short, rapid and
incremental improvement.
2. Kai Sigma is developed from the Kaizen approach and use the DMAIC
process.
Part VI – The Part of Tens