Lean Six Sigma For Dummies

John Morgan, Martin Brenig-Jones

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119073819
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Prise de décision

Maximise the quality and efficiency of your organisation with Lean Six Sigma

Are you looking to make your organisation more effective and productive? If you answered "yes, " you need to change the way it thinks. Combining the leading improvement methods of Six Sigma and Lean, this winning technique drives performance to the next level—and this friendly and accessible guide shows you how. The third edition of Lean Six Sigma For Dummies outlines the key concepts of this strategy and explains how you can use it to get the very best out of your team and your business.

The jargon-crowded language and theory of Lean Six Sigma can be intimidating for both beginners and experienced users. Written in plain English and packed with lots of helpful examples, this easy-to-follow guide arms you with tools and techniques for implementing Lean Six Sigma and offers guidance on everything from policy deployment to managing change in your organisation—and everything in between.

• Gives you plain-English explanations of complicated jargon
• Serves as a useful tool for businesspeople looking to make their organisation more effective
• Helps you achieve goals with ease and confidence
• Provides useful hands-on checklists

Whether you want to manage a project more tightly or fine-tune existing systems and processes, the third edition of Lean Six Sigma For Dummies makes it easier to achieve your business goals.

Part I

Getting Started with Lean Six Sigma

Go to www.dummies.com for more information about topics that interest you – everything from using Lean Six Sigma in your organization to holding effective meetings and from building teamwork to understanding quality control.

In this part …

Grasp the basics of Lean Thinking and Six Sigma so you can understand what they mean and what they don’t mean.

Get a clearer picture of what the synergy created by merging the two disciplines into Lean Six Sigma looks like and understand the key principles underpinning the approach.

Comprehend exactly what ‘sigma’ means and why the term is important in Lean Six Sigma.

Examine in depth what the commonly used process improvement method known as DMAIC – Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control – means in Lean Six Sigma.

Chapter 1

Defining Lean Six Sigma

In This Chapter

Turning up trumps for the Toyota Production System

Finding out the fundamentals of ‘Lean’ and ‘Six Sigma’

Applying Lean Six Sigma in your organisation

Throughout this book we cover the tools and techniques available to help you achieve real improvement in your organisation. In this chapter we aim to move you down a path of different thinking that gets your improvement taste buds tingling. We look at the main concepts behind Lean thinking and Six Sigma and introduce some of the terminology to help you on your way.

Introducing Lean Thinking

Lean thinking focuses on enhancing value for the customer by improving and smoothing the process flow (see Chapter 11) and eliminating waste (covered in Chapter 9). Since Henry Ford’s first production line, Lean thinking has evolved through a number of sources, and over many years, but much of the development has been led by Toyota through the Toyota Production System (TPS). Toyota built on Ford’s production ideas, moving from high volume, low variety, to high variety, low volume.

Although Lean thinking is usually seen as being a manufacturing concept and application, many of the tools and techniques were originally developed in service organisations. These include, for example, spaghetti diagrams, part of the organisation and methods toolkit, and the visual system used by supermarkets to replenish shelves. Indeed, it was a supermarket that helped shape the thinking behind the Toyota Production System. During a tour to General Motors and Ford, Kiichiro Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno visited Piggly Wiggly, an American supermarket, and noticed Just in Time and kanban being applied. This innovation enabled Piggly Wiggly customers to ‘buy what they need at any time’ and avoided the store holding excess stock. Kanban is simply a card providing the signal to order more stock. Incidentally, Piggly Wiggly was founded in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee by the innovative Clarence Saunders, who was also the first to introduce the concept of a self-service grocery shop.

Lean is called ‘Lean’ not because things are stripped to the bone. Lean isn’t a recipe for your organisation to slash its costs, although it will likely lead to reduced costs and better value for the customer. We trace the concept of the word ‘Lean’ back to 1987, when John Krafcik (who is joining Google to provide advice on the driverless car) was working as a researcher for MIT as part of the International Motor Vehicle Program. Krafcik needed a label for the TPS phenomenon that described what the system did. On a white board he wrote the performance attributes of the Toyota system compared with traditional mass production. TPS:

• Needed less human effort to design products and services.
• Required less investment for a given amount of production capacity.
• Created products with fewer delivered defects.
• Used fewer suppliers.
• Went from concept to launch, order to delivery and problem to repair in less time and with less human effort.
• Needed less inventory at every process step.
• Caused fewer employee injuries.

Krafcik commented:

It needs less of everything to create a given amount of value, so let’s call it Lean.

The Lean enterprise was born.

Bringing on the basics of Lean

Figure 1-1 shows the Toyota Production System, highlighting various tools and Japanese Lean thinking terms that we use throughout this book. In this chapter we provide some brief descriptions to introduce the Lean basics and the TPS.

© John Morgan and Martin Brenig-Jones

Figure 1-1: The TPS house.

Toyota’s Taiichi Ohno describes the TPS approach very effectively:

All we are doing is looking at a timeline from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that timeline by removing the non-value-added wastes.

The TPS approach really is about understanding how the work gets done, finding ways of doing it better, smoother and faster, and closing the time gap between the start and end points of our processes. And it applies to any process. Whether you’re working in the public or private sector, in service, transactional or manufacturing processes really doesn’t matter.

Think about your own processes for a moment. Do you feel that some unnecessary steps or activities seem to waste time and effort?

We must point out, however, that simply adopting the tools and techniques of the TPS isn’t enough to sustain improvement and embed the principles and thinking into your organisation. Toyota chairperson Fujio Cho provides a clue as to what’s also needed:

The key to the Toyota way is not any of the individual elements but all the elements together as a system. It must be practised every day in a very consistent manner – not in spurts. We place the highest value on taking action and implementation. By improvement based on action, one can rise to the higher level of practice and knowledge.

Picking on people power

Figure 1-1 shows that people are at the heart of TPS. The system focuses on training to develop exceptional people and teams that follow the company’s philosophy to gain exceptional results. Consider the following:

• Toyota creates a strong and stable culture wherein values and beliefs are widely shared and lived out over many years.
• Toyota works constantly to reinforce that culture.
• Toyota involves cross-functional teams to solve problems.
• Toyota keeps teaching individuals how to work together.

Being Lean means involving people in the process, equipping them to be able, and feel able, to challenge and improve their processes and the way they work. Never waste the creative potential of people!

Looking at the lingo

You can see from Figure 1-1 that Lean thinking involves a certain amount of jargon – some of it Japanese. This section defines the various terms to help you get Lean thinking as soon as possible:

• Heijunka provides the foundation. It encompasses the idea of smoothing processing and production by considering levelling, sequencing and standardising:
  • Levelling involves smoothing the volume of production in order to reduce variation, that is, the ups and downs and peaks and troughs that can make planning difficult. Amongst other things, levelling seeks to prevent ‘end-of-period’ peaks, where production is initially slow at the beginning of the month, but then quickens in the last days of a sale or accounting period, for example.
  • Sequencing may well involve mixing the types of work processed. So, for example, when setting up new loans in a bank, the type of loan being processed is mixed to better match customer demand, and help ensure applications are actioned in date order. So often, people are driven by internal efficiency targets, whereby they process the ‘simple tasks’ first to get them out of the way and ‘hit their numbers’, leaving the more difficult cases to be processed later on. This means tasks are not processed in date order, and people are reluctant to get down and tackle a pile of difficult cases at the end of the week, making things even worse f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Getting Started with Lean Six Sigma
• Part II: Working with Lean Six Sigma
• Part III: Assessing Performance
• Part IV: Improving the Processes
• Part V: Deploying Lean Six Sigma
• Part VI: The Part of Tens
• About the Authors
• Cheat Sheet
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement