"Ensuring Optimal Success With Six Sigma Implementations"

George Byrne

Journal of Organizational Excellence

Spring 2003, pp. 43-50

The author of this article identifies three major reasons why Six Sigma initiatives sometimes fail:

1. Companies "do not always provide these initiatives with the strong and visionary leadership they require to truly take hold in an organization and fundamentally change how people do their everyday jobs."
2. Top-level business leaders, "who may be accustomed to operating by dictate and fiat, mandate that Six Sigma methods be quickly implemented and that results from the projects quickly follow. This can be unrealistic."
3. Six Sigma projects can fail "if Black Belts—the individuals actually tasked with leading a company's Six Sigma projects and achieving specific financial targets—receive neither the coaching, training, nor top-leadership mentoring they need to succeed in their jobs."

To effectively deploy Six Sigma and avoid these three pitfalls, the author recommends the following steps:

1. The top leaders—including the CEO—must become highly visible and vigorous champions of Six Sigma;
2. To build broad-based commitment to Six Sigma principles, a company's top business leaders must play a strong, hand-on role in cascading Six Sigma knowledge and work practices to others in the organization;
3. As leadership of Six Sigma initiatives is cascaded to individuals at successively lower levels in the company, it is critical to enlist the active support and engagement of business process owners in Six Sigma project implementation;
4. Select Black Belts that have the competencies necessary for the job;
5. At the appropriate time, provide Black Belt training that addresses the needs of the individuals as well as the requirements of the job.

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"Work Redesign and Performance Management in Times of Downsizing"

A.S. Evangelista and Lisa Burke

Business Horizons

March-April 2003, pp. 71-76

This article addresses the concerns of organizations that have chosen to downsize to the extent that they may be facing any of the following problems:

1. the failure or inability to identify and categorize duties and assignments;
2. the failure to identify when they have overtasked an employee; and
3. the failure to see when a business unit's demands exceed its capacity.

The authors of this article propose that in order to deal with this situation that managers need to identify and categorize all projects and tasks to determine which activities are to be retained and which are to be eliminated. Four task categories are discussed in the article:

1. critical tasks—"those that enable a company to accomplish its primary organizational objectives; they are essential to maintaining the firm's strategic intent, and must be performed to completion at the highest quality standard";
2. sub-critical tasks—ones that need to be performed, but an average standard of quality will suffice;
3. minor tasks—ones that add value to the firm but will not hinder operations or organizational goals if left undone; and
4. unnecessary tasks—ones that can be discarded because they most likely drain resources away from the critical or sub-critical tasks.

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"Create a Lean, Mean Machine"

George Alukal

Quality Progress

April 2003, pp. 29-35

This article provides a good, brief primer on Lean Manufacturing. The author states that "Lean emphasizes such things as teamwork, continuous training and learning, producing to demand (pull), mass customization and batch size reduction, cellular production, quick changeover, and total productive maintenance. Not surprisingly, lean implementation uses both incremental and breakthrough improvement approaches."

The author explains that cutting out the following eight types of waste is the major objective of lean implementation:

1. overproduction—making more, earlier or faster than required by the next process;
2. inventory waste—any supply in excess of a one-piece flow (make one batch and move one batch) through the manufacturing process, whether it is raw materials, work in process or finished goods;
3. defective product—product requiring inspection, sorting, scrapping, downgrading, replacement or repair;
4. overprocessing—extra effort that adds no value to the product (or service) from the customer's point of view;
5. waiting—idle time waiting for such things as manpower, materials, machinery, measurement, or information;
6. people—not fully using people's mental and creative skills and experience;
7. motion—any movement of people, tooling and equipment that does not add value to the product or service;
8. transportation waste—transporting parts or materials around the plant.

The "lean building blocks", or tools and techniques, discussed in the article are:

1. 5S—a system for workplace organization and standardization;
2. visual controls—placing all tooling, parts, production activities and indicators in view so everyone involved can understand the status of the system at a glance;
3. streamlined layout—designed according to the optimum operational sequence;
4. standardized work—performance according to prescribed methods, without waste and focused on ergonomics;
5. batch size reduction—the ideal is one-piece flow;
6. teams—working in improvement teams or daily work teams;
7. quality at the source—operators do not pass defects to the next process;
8. point of use storage—items are stored where they are needed;
9. quick changeover—ability to change tooling and fixtures rapidly to allow multiple products in smaller batches;
10. pull and kanban—not producing until the downstream customer signals a need;
11. cellular or flow—maximizing value added while minimizing waste;
12. total productive maintenance—maximizing overall equipment effectiveness.

The article also discusses the managers' role in successful lean implementation and the importance of implementing pilot projects first.

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"Ten Principles of Collaborative Organizations"

S. Beyerlein, S. Freedman, C. McGee, and L. Moran

Journal of Organizational Excellence

Spring 2003, pp. 51-63

This article starts with the premise that "competitive pressures require collaboration across teams, levels, projects, functions and organizational boundaries-including the need for collaboration with customers, vendors, business partners, and governmental and other nonprofit agencies."

The following ten principles are discussed as keys to making collaboration effective:

1. Focus collaboration on achieving business results—This creates a common purpose and context for decision making;
2. Align organizational support systems to promote ownership—This fosters commitment to and understanding of the overall goals of the organization;
3. Articulate and enforce "a few strict rules"—This creates the necessary cohesion to foster goal-directed cooperative effort while maintaining the flexibility to respond to changing demands and opportunities;
4. Exploit the rhythm of divergence and convergence—This provides the necessary balance between generating new and exciting ideas and the discipline necessary to do the job;
5. Manage complex tradeoffs on a timely basis—This provides the information and disciplined processes for making the complex decisions in new situations;
6. Create higher standards for discussion, dialogue, and information sharing—This ensures that more information is considered and more potential consequences are anticipated in each example of collaboration;
7. Foster personal accountability—This ensures that each individual fulfills his or her role effectively and provides some value-adding contribution;
8. Align authority, information, and decision making—This ensures that the team has the information necessary to make good decisions and the authority and accountability to implement those decisions;
9. Treat collaboration as a disciplined process—This ensures that the correct information is considered, the deliberations are focused and balanced, and the decisions are workable; and
10. Design and promote flexible organizations—This fosters multiple grouping across members to meet the changing requirements of the organization to do the work.

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"The Supply Chain Management Effect"

Laura Lopczak and M. Eric Johnson

MIT Sloan Management Review

Spring 2003, pp. 27-34

The authors of this article argue that "Supply-chain management has led to six major shifts in business thinking. It is those shifts that have guided and will continue to guide companies in choosing which supply-chain-management initiatives and enablers they should implement internally and with their partners."

The six major shifts are:

1. From cross-functional integration to cross-enterprise too—The thinking has gone from "How do we get the various functional areas of our company to work together to supply product to our immediate customers?" to "How do we coordinate activities across companies, as well as across internal functions, to supply product to the market?";
2. From physical efficiency to market mediation—The thinking has gone from "How do we minimize the costs our company incurs in production and distribution of our products?" to "How do we minimize the costs of matching supply and demand while continuing to reduce the costs of production and distribution?";
3. From supply focus to demand focus—The thinking has gone from "How can we improve the way we supply product in order to match supply and demand better, given the demand pattern?" to "How can we get earlier demand information or affect the demand pattern to match supply and demand?";
4. From single-company product design to collaborative, concurrent product, process, and supply-chain design—The thinking has gone from "How should our company design products to minimize product cost (our cost of materials, production and distribution?" to "How should collaborators design the product, process and supply chain to minimize cost?";
5. From cost reduction to breakthrough business models—The thinking has gone from "How can we reduce our company's production and distribution costs?") to "What new supply-chain and marketing approach would lead to a breakthrough in customer value?";
6. From mass-market supply to tailored offerings—The thinking has gone from "How should we organize our company's operations to serve the mass market efficiently while offering customized products?" to "How should we organize the supply chain to serve each customer or segment uniquely and provide a tailored customer experience?"

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Six Sigma By Any Other Name

From GP Deltapoint

Mike Bresko, Managing Director; and John McNeil, Principal Consultant

Most organizations today are interested or even invested in continuous improvement programs; generally aimed at improving quality as defined by end users. Six Sigma programs are probably the most widely touted; their part in the successes of GE, Motorola, Alstom and others is well documented.

So should everyone be jumped on board by now? Should we be conducting designed experiments this very week? Should all our employees become green belts at minimum or face being replaced? Well the answer is a qualified yes. Most every organization can benefit from reduction in waste and improvement in quality beyond gains already made. And the degree to which this can be formalized and become part of the everyday fabric of business will determine the degree to which these efforts are likely to be successful, sustained and repeatable. But sometimes programs that are not labeled Six Sigma per se will fit the bill and their training and implementation may be less costly in some situations and for some organizations.

The automotive industry promotes a program called Global 8D. Six Sigma programs often have five steps: Design, Measure, Analyze, Implement and Control. 8D has eight steps (Prepare, Establish team, Describe Problem, Find and Verify Root Cause, Determine Corrective Actions, Implement and Validate, Prevent Recurrence, Recognize Team), but they accomplish similar ends: structured work aimed at measurable improvements. GP Deltapoint trains and implements a program called Quality Improvement Story. It has 9 steps which the program encourages teams to lay out on a large 3x3 grid. Step one is to State the Problem, followed by Current Situation data and information and a Root Cause Analysis. Step 4 is to select a solution that prevents and remedies the problem, then follows developing an Action Plan and Recording Actions. Step 7 is to check results. Step 8 is to put measures and reliable methods in place and step 9 is to complete the story by noting left over problems, future plans and findings. There is not a specific requirement to carry out rigorous statistical analysis in QIS, although it certainly is not discouraged. Rather the emphasis is on thinking, analyzing and communicating in a structured way. We have enjoyed success in world class and unsophisticated organizations alike with QIS, but wholly endorse any method that makes continuous improvement a way of life.

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