The stages of Lean Six Sigma deployment follow the plan, do, check, act cycle. This includes identifying an opportunity, designing a solution, implementing it, and then moving into a continuous improvement cycle. To do that successfully means we have to equip people with the right skills and the knowledge about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Sharing the objectives will help others to participate and support us in taking action. We need to recognize the all important customer and how they define value using voice of the customer data collection tools. From there, we can identify existing opportunities. We can observe or measure the current situation and identify the biggest sources of waste and variation that we can immediately address in order to increase value for the organization and for our customers. Designing a solution very often is dependent on some level of process or value stream mapping. There are four stages in a Lean Six Sigma deployment. Stage 1 is identify opportunity. Stage 2 is design solution. Stage 3 is implement solution. And stage 4 is ensure continuous improvement. The steps for stage 1 are employee training, recognizing customer defined value, and identify existing opportunities. In stage 2 of Lean Six Sigma deployment, we design the solution.
Let’s consider an example where we’re mapping out the flow of a direct mail piece. It begins with the compiling of names and data. We then verify who we want to send our offer to based on their credit. We merge that data and we transfer it to our vendors who actually produce the flyer document. Finally, we will send the document to the vendor who will actually print the flyers and mail them to our customers. In this situation, the task is to develop a new mail piece in 52 days. The master schedule has five activities, each having a varying duration. The first task is compile names, which takes 3 to 6 days. The next task is verify credit and addresses, which takes 16 days. The third task is data merge, that takes 31 days. The next task is to transfer to vendors which takes 1 day. The final task is to print and mail vendors, which takes 10 days. The total lead time is 61.64 days. One of the important things about designing a solution is to zero in on where we get the biggest bang for the buck and where we’re likely to find our biggest improvement opportunities. So if we evaluate the limited data with 61 days in this value stream, reducing time sounds important. And we calculate that just two of these five steps make up 47 of those 61 days. That would be a clue that maybe we want to focus there first. So how do we identify which improvements to address first? Well, there are some pieces to that. We want to assess the impact. We need to understand what the low hanging fruit is that would affect people the most. We might want to prioritize those things where we can involve people in the solution. People would have to support that and maintain it in the future.
We also like that to be highly visible. We need to generate quick wins early in the implementation of Lean and Six Sigma. We have to be very cognizant of these issues as we move through the process. In the third stage of Lean Six Sigma deployment, we decide which improvements to address first. We then prioritize low hanging fruit, which are improvements that involve workers and processes that have highly visible waste. To ensure continuous improvement, it is important to create employee buy-in and ownership. There are many things we need to do including deploying high performing teams methodologies, involving people in the process, training them to be cooperative, and communicating to gain their support. We need to listen to and honor people in the process. We need to commit to eliminating defects and waste in our process. And the focus is zero, zero defects and zero waste. We also need to ensure that those processes and improvements are sustained over time. There are a number of tools that can help with this, such as error proofing or poka-yoke, standard operating procedures, balanced scorecard, and other things like statistical process control. But we’re never done. We need to remember that Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma together are a continuous improvement methodology. In the fourth stage of Lean Six Sigma deployment, we ensure continuous improvement requires employee buy-in and ownership.
They need to continue to find new ways to eliminate waste, ensure that improvements are sustained, generate new ideas, and act on ideas. We also need to remember that ideas are great, but until we act on them, until we take action, ideas have no real value to the organization. So from a Six Sigma perspective, there are many Lean tools that we want to apply. For example, just on a general level, we need to apply the notion of value chain and value stream, creating flow and perfection in the ability to process, to execute flawlessly. We also don’t want to overlook many different process improvement tools that we use, for example, waste elimination techniques. The use of value stream mapping to help understand where in the value stream we can make improvements that would have the biggest effect on the customer and on the organization. Can we put in kanban and pull systems, make things just in time, create better flow. We’re looking to leverage the tools of kanban, pull signals, and things of that nature and leverage things like poka-yoke and error-proofing with standard visual work throughout the process. And finally, let’s discuss Lean tools used by Six Sigma. The general Lean concepts that may be used are the ideas of value chain, flow, and perfection. The process improvement tools are waste elimination, value stream mapping, pull systems, just-in-time, cycle-time reduction, continuous flow, kanban, and poka-yoke. And the control tools are Total Productive Maintenance, or TPM, visual factory, and visual controls.