Corporate E-Learning

During the last couple of decades small, mid-sized and Fortune 500 companies have embraced Six Sigma to generate more profit and greater savings. So what is Six Sigma? Six Sigma is a data-driven approach for eliminating defects and waste in any business process. You can compare Six Sigma with turning your water faucet and experiencing the flow of clean, clear water. Reliable systems are in place to purify, treat, and pressure the water through the faucet. That is what Six Sigma does to business: it treats the processes in business so that they deliver their intended result. What is "Sigma"? The word is a statistical term that measures how far a given process deviates from perfection. Sigma is a way to measure quality and performance. The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many "defects" you have in a process, you can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to "zero defects" as possible. This workshop will give participants an overview of the Six Sigma methodology, and some of the tools required to deploy Six Sigma in their own organizations.

Lean and Six Sigma are buzz-words we hear in business all of the time. Before we get started, let’s make sure we all understand just what we mean by “lean” and “Six Sigma”.

In this module we will look closer at Toyota’s philosophies that have become a spiritual pinnacle of modern manufacturing. “The Toyota Way” is a book about the 14 principles that drive Toyota’s culture. The book was written by Dr. Jeffery Liker, a leading author on lean practices and an expert on U.S. and Japanese differences in manufacturing.

If TPS is a mindset, then what’s holding it all together, is the TPS House. In this module we look at the TPS house, the blueprint for a Lean Enterprise that has become one of the most recognizable symbols of modern manufacturing. The house represents a structural system of how to view our business and organization: The house is strong if the roof, the pillars, and the foundations are strong. A weak link weakens the whole system. It starts with the goals of best quality, lowest cost and shortest lead time – the roof. There are two main pillars holding the roof up: Just-in-Time (JIT) and Jidoka. JIT and Jidoka mean never letting a defect pass into the next station and freeing people from machines – automation without a human touch. In the center of the system are people.

In this module we’ll look closer at five great principles that are also known as Womack’s Principles. Benchmarking of automotive production facilities, Womack developed a set of five principles that form the basis lean enterprise implementation. The results were published in the book “Lean Thinking”, a milestone in Lean Management.

The Kano model is a theory of product development and customer satisfaction. When introduced in the 80’s the model challenged traditional Customer Satisfaction Models that More is better, i.e. the more you perform on each service attribute the more satisfied the customers will be. The Kano model assumes that every customer has a unique preference, and that a product has attributes that have different values to different customers.

Muda is the waste and work that does not add any value to the product and that the customer would not pay for if given a choice. All waste has a cost that is direct loss to the company. In Lean and Six Sigma manufacturing, the focus is especially on eliminating three types of waste: • Muda (Waste) • Muri (Strain/Overburden) • Mura (Unevenness) Now let’s learn how we can eliminate waste!

If you toss a coin, what’s the chance it lands on heads? If you toss a coin ten times, you expect five heads and five tails. If you toss the coin ten times, and do it over and over again, the output varies. The extent to which your experience deviates from expectation is the extent to which variation has occurred. If you measure something that occurs many times it’s going to vary around an average – or mean-value. Variation is deviation from expectation. The size, trends, nature, causes, effects, and control of this variation is the center of Six Sigma methodology. Describing variability over a period of time helps us understand how the system is working and to predict how it will continue to work in the future.

A product or service that is very complex adds more non-value, higher costs, and more work than processes that are slow or of poor quality. In other words, the complexity of something is more expensive than something that is lower quality or produced in a lower speed.

By now you will know that in the world of lean, good enough is never good enough. In this module, we’re breaking down Continuous Improvement into three basic principles: 1. Challenge: We have to challenge ourselves every day to see if we are achieving our goals. 2. Kaizen: Good enough is never enough, no process can ever be thought to be perfect, and thus operations must be improved continuously. 3. Genchi Genbutsu: A term that means “Going to the source” to see the facts for oneself and make the right decisions, create consensus, and make sure goals are attained at the best possible speed.

So what happens now? Module Eleven provides some basic methods and organizational advice for the journey ahead. Six Sigma can be a long journey but with a basic understanding of its methods and tools it will improve your work and personal life.

Although this workshop is coming to a close, we hope that your journey to improve your Six Sigma is just beginning. Please take a moment to review and update your action plan. This will be a key tool to guide your progress in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. We wish you the best of luck on the rest of your travels!