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Quality, Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing Tools and Concepts

Recommended Posts: Standardized Work Instructions - Cease Mass Inspection for Quality - Visible Data - Evolution of the PDSA Cycle
Related: Management Improvement Tools Explained - 7 basic quality tools - PDSA - Control Chart - 5s - Kanban - Flowchart...

March 11, 2008
February 27, 2008

Lean Six Sigma Case Studies

ValuMetrix Services provides some really nice lean six sigma case studies. Simple short but still with enough detail to actually provide some sense of what is going on.

While on the topic of online case studies let me plug the Curious Cat management improvement library. I think it is one of the more valuable resources for management improvement offered on the Curious Cat sites. Library shelves: health care articles, lean manufacturing articles, six sigma articles, newly added articles

via: Daily Kaizen

Related: Curious Cat Management Search - Management Consulting, what does the web site show? - Lean Management Case Study

January 6, 2008

Stratification and Systemic Thinking

I am reading a fascinating book by Jessica Snyder Sachs: Good Germs, Bad Germs. From page 108:

At New York Hospital, Eichenwald and infectious disease specialist Henry Shinefield conceived and developed a controversial program that entailed deliberately inoculating a newborn’s nostrils and umbilical stump with a comparatively harmless strain of staph before 80/81 could move in. Shinefield had found the protective strain - dubbed 502A - in the nostrils of a New York Hospital baby nurse. Like a benign Typhoid Mary, Nurse Lasky had been spreading her staph to many of the newborns in her care. Here babies remained remarkably healthy, while those under the care of other nurses were falling ill.

This is a great example of a positive special cause. How would you identify this? First you would have to stratify the data. It also shows that sometimes looking at the who is important (the problem is just that we far too often look at who instead of the system so at times some get the idea that it is not ok to stratify data based on who - it is just be careful because we often do that when it is not the right approach and we can get fooled by random variation into thinking there is a cause - see the red bead experiment for an example); that it is possible to stratify the data by person to good effect.

The following 20 pages in the book are littered with very interesting details many of which tie to thinking systemically and the perils of optimizing part of the system (both when considering the system to be one person and also when viewing it as society).

I have recently taken to reading more and more about viruses, bacteria, cells, microbiology etc.: it is fascinating stuff.

Related: Science Books by topic - Data Can’t Lie - Understanding Data

January 2, 2008

It Just Works

Does Your Product Or Service “Just Work”? By Jim Kukral

That’s it. It’s the highest compliment you can get. “It just works” is a very powerful phrase in this day and age

There is truth to that statement. I think largely due to how bad so many products are - that they don’t actually work. The Kano model of customer satisfaction is an excellent way to view customer expectations.

The Kano model states that you have expected quality - it just does what it needs to (what is expected). Then more is better type - give me more at the same price and I am happier. But where you really want to get as a company is products and services that delight customers.

When you are delighted you are not easy prey to other companies. When you are satisfied you are ready for offers that say we will give it to you a bit cheaper or give you a bit more. But if you are delighted you don’t want to leave and instead are telling everyone you know how great this product or service is.

I think it might be that in many cases now people are delighted if things just work. Perhaps they have become so disillusioned that something actually working is delightful - I think there is real truth here. Which shows how much room there is to improve. It is such a huge bother to deal with junk that doesn’t work and the thought of dealing with the lousy service on such failures is enough to drive them to tears.

Related: What Job Does Your Product Do? - Quality Customer Focus - Ritz Carlton and Home Depot - Good Customer Service Example - Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service - More Bad Customer Service Examples :-(

December 14, 2007

Great Visual Instruction Example

antibiotic visual instructions

This does a great job of explaining what you need to know clearly. While this presentation for Azithromycin doesn’t prevent a mistake it sure makes it much more likely that the process can be completed successfully. We need more effort in creating such clear instructions.

Visual clarity is more important than lots of words. Applying that concept is not as easy as it sounds but it is a very important idea for instructions to end use and instructions for processes in your organization. Expecting people to read much is just setting yourself up for failure when they don’t bother (you should consider psychology, and how people will actually use your instructions not how you want them to).

via: Prescription UI

Related: Using Design to Reduce Medical Errors - Visual Instructions Example - Visual Work Instructions - Standardized Work Instructions - Health Care Pictographs - 5s - Edward Tufte’s: Envisioning Information

December 7, 2007

The Power of a Checklist

Great article on The Checklist - If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do? by Atul Gawande

A decade ago, Israeli scientists published a study in which engineers observed patient care in I.C.U.s for twenty-four-hour stretches. They found that the average patient required a hundred and seventy-eight individual actions per day, ranging from administering a drug to suctioning the lungs, and every one of them posed risks. Remarkably, the nurses and doctors were observed to make an error in just one per cent of these actions—but that still amounted to an average of two errors a day with every patient.

In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert. With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident.

Yet it’s far from obvious that something as simple as a checklist could be of much help in medical care. Sick people are phenomenally more various than airplanes. A study of forty-one thousand trauma patients—just trauma patients—found that they had 1,224 different injury-related diagnoses in 32,261 unique combinations for teams to attend to. That’s like having 32,261 kinds of airplane to land. Mapping out the proper steps for each is not possible, and physicians have been skeptical that a piece of paper with a bunch of little boxes would improve matters much. In 2001, though, a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Peter Pronovost decided to give it a try.

Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

Teams also complained to the hospital officials that the checklist required that patients be fully covered with a sterile drape when lines were being put in, but full-size barrier drapes were often unavailable. So the officials made sure that the drapes were stocked. Then they persuaded Arrow International, one of the largest manufacturers of central lines, to produce a new central-line kit that had both the drape and chlorhexidine in it.

Related: Why Isn’t Work Standard? - Visual Work Instructions - posts on quality tools - European Blackout not Human Error-Not

November 3, 2007

Design of Experiments in Operational Testing

Edwards looks toward future of testing

We are fielding a Design of Experiments concept to ensure we conduct the right amount of testing — not too much or too little, but just right. We will field this approach in phases as we must train our people and put the right tools in place. However, it is already showing great promise.

In a recent Benefield Anechoic Facility test, the 412th Electronic Warfare Group used Design of Experiments methodology to cut a two-month program to three weeks. This schedule reduction translated directly into savings and helped reduce the concept-to-fielding cycle time while still ensuring the system was thoroughly tested. While building these capabilities is critical, the most critical piece of the puzzle is our people. We must continue to develop engineers, pilots, navigators, program managers and maintainers to test these systems and “find stuff so the warfighter doesn’t.”

It is hard to tell if they really are using Design of Experiments or just using the term but it seem possible they are really using it. As I have said a number of times it is a powerful and under-utilized tool for improvement. Related: Using Design of Experiments - design of experiments articles - posts on public sector management - Why Use Designed Factorial Experiments?

August 29, 2007

Constant Change and Growth

The Toyota Secret: Constant Change And Growth by Norman Bodek

the chairman of Toyota Motor Corporation. He said, “Failure to change is a vice! I want everyone at Toyota to change and at least do not be an obstacle for someone else who wants to change.”

Every day the manager should look around the company, take videos and still pictures, and challenge people to grow, to eliminate non-value adding wastes, to use their brains to identify and solve problems, and to improve their skills and capabilities. Why else do we need managers? A manager’s job is to stimulate people to change for the better, every day.

Great article. Kaikaku by Bodek. via New Norman Bodek Article

Related: Lean Podcast with Bodek - Change is not Improvement - What Is Muda? - lean management resources - Curious Cat management articles

August 21, 2007

Improvement Tools and Improving Management

Tools are just tools by Lee Fried

We have begun to shift away from a tool driven approach to one more centered on improving our management systems. This makes the work far more difficult, yet far more rewarding.

Great post. Great goal; and quite a challenge. My personal belief is while you are trying to make this change (which takes years) to become an organization that acts as a system you must balance education (an investment - one of the best forms of investment often) and improvements gains today (both are needed). And just applying tools effectively can often provide nice gains today (with the right guidance and proper restraint).

Often the two go hand in hand - there is little more educational than actually participating in using quality/lean/improvement tools and concepts to solve your own problems. That is the best way for managers to learn about lean thinking. But I think when you see this dual role of current improvement efforts it changes your measure of success - not just measuring improvement for today (or improvements in the value stream that will pay dividends for years) but also valuing the new knowledge gained by the participants. I have never been able to quantify the benefit of the education but that doesn’t bother me.

Related: Systemic Improvement - Encourage Improvement Action by Everyone - Keeping Track of Improvement Opportunities - Search management improvement sites selected by Curious Cat

July 11, 2007

From Lean Tools to Lean Management

From lean tools to lean management by Jim Womack:

The attraction of tools is that they can be employed at many points within an organization, often by staff improvement teams or external consultants. Even better, they can be applied in isolation without tackling the difficult task of changing the organization and the fundamental approach to management. I often say that managers will try anything easy that doesn’t work before they will try anything hard that does, and this may be a fair summary of what happened in the Tool Age

Teach all managers to ask questions about their value streams (rather than giving answers and orders from higher levels). Turn these questions into experiments using Plan-Do-Check-Act.

Only management by science through constant experimentation to answer questions can produce sustainable improvements in value streams. ( Toyota’s A3 is a wonderful management tool for putting science to work.)

He is right. The tools are useful. The much more significant changes are in the management suite not on the shop floor (or cubicle farm). Even on the shop floor there is room for huge amounts of improvement. In the c-suite I don’t know how to explain the amount of work left to do. Lets say this - there is much much much more improvement left to do than has been done so far.

Related: articles by Jim Womack - Deming on Management

July 9, 2007

Good Customer Service Example

IRA Toyota - Milford; Great Service

I was pleasantly surprised to find a “Service wizard” available. You create an account, specify the standard details about the car (make, model, year, mileage). If you add the VIN, they will be able to provide and maintain additional details.

The slickest part of the wizard was the capability to pick a service and schedule a date. Depending upon what service you picked, the calendar changed. This wasn’t any old calendar. This was dynamic. Clearly, they had predefined the capability of handling some number of services per day. It was likely also interactive depending upon what was already scheduled for that day. This all makes wonderful sense but I had not seen this before.

I went ahead and scheduled the service for Monday AM planning to drop the car off Sunday night. Saturday, we received an email reminding us of the service scheduled for the car. Sunday, Allison and I drive over to their location, pull into the lot following the “Service” sign and find lanes specially marked for night drop off. There were already some cars in the lanes so we found a spot. The box on the wall had a pen and several forms. We filled out one and put the keys in the envelop through the clearly marked “key drop” slot. This group has figured out service and seems to have thought of everything. The drive home continued the conversation on how well they have planned for service; web site wizard, email reminders, lanes for drop off, etc. Well done!

I think the lean folks will like the level loading the dynamic calendar facilitates (and all the other ways the process provided value to the customer). This strategy levels the load by pushing around demand a bit (rather than just accommodating whatever demand exists - real world conditions can make this the correct strategy). For example, if special machines are needed for certain jobs and the long term demand supports one of each such machine and if you can adjust the flow to level out the demand doing so is a good strategy. As this example shows, customers have flexibility in scheduling preventative maintenance; therefore take advantage of that in your system design.
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July 4, 2007

Process Improvement and Innovation

Every so often an article appears discussing the need to change focus from process improvement to innovation (and recently they are followed with quite a bit of blog talk). I disagree on several grounds. First you have needed to focus on both all the time. Second, it is not an either or choice. Third, the process of innovation should be improved.

I do not believe process improvement is bad for innovation. Bad process changes can be bad for innovation. But if we are looking at a research and development organization where the output is new products then process improvement would be focused on improving the processes to make that happen. The type of process improvement would be different than those made to manufacturing a product better.

Some six sigma efforts are little more than cost cutting efforts. And those efforts might claim a “process improvement” that is really just cutting costs in R&D. But we should not confuse bad management with the good practice of process improvement. Yes, cutting costs for the sake of cutting costs often leads to problems. Waste should be eliminated (which can reduces cost). Focus on eliminating waste. Eliminating waste in innovation activities is no worse than eliminating it anywhere. It might be more difficult to determine what is waste (that is where management skill and knowledge come into play) but the idea that process improvement (including eliminating waste is bad for innovation is something that should be rejected). And process improvement in innovation should not be limited to eliminating waste.

A good example of process improvement in innovation activities: Fast Cycle Change in Knowledge-Based Organizations (pdf format) by Ian Hau and Ford Calhoun, published by the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement, University of Wisconsin - Madison.

Related: Better and Different - New Rules for Management? No! - Quality and Innovation - “New” Management Needs - Management Advice Failures

Visual Instructions Example

Visual Instructions

How to get people to actually use instructions for using your product: make it easy to do so. This blog post illustrates a well designed instruction guide for the Seagate FreeAgent backup drive. Simple pictures make it very obvious what to do (and even includes a time stamp showing how long into the process you are - which shows you the total time it will take at one simple glance 1 minute and 36 seconds).

Such instructions are a great example to guide internal standard work instructions.

Related: Why Isn’t Work Standard? - How to Create Visual Work Instructions - blog posts on quality tools - management improvement glossary

June 21, 2007

Why Isn’t Work Standard?

Are You Really Asking? by Mark Graban

The worst form would be, “Why the hell aren’t you following the standard work??? How many times do I have to emphasize that??” A better approach might be, “It appears that the standard work isn’t being followed. Why is this the case? Has something changed? Is there a problem we need to fix?” (as a legitimate question that you want the answer to).

Good advice. When standard work is not followed by one person then it might be that intervention with that one person is needed (or in some cases it might be that person found a better way and you need to update the standard and figure out why the standard wasn’t updated before - probably a system problem, annoying to follow procedure to get improvement adopted…). Much more often “policy” (which might be similar to standard work - but I think standard work really requires a system that is missing in places where “standard work” is not standard at all) is not followed in general - everyone does their own thing.

Then obviously (at least to someone that understands management) the issue is why does the documented standard work differ from the practice and why is management allowing such a divergence… Fix the system. What needs to be worked on is the failure of the management to create a system where standard work is the way work is done, not blaming everyone for not following the standard in various ways. Often this can be the practice, though not as obvious as stated, for example, when common cause errors are examined as special causes. Instead of looking at all the data, the error in question is examined, hey they didn’t follow x procedure - obviously they are to blame. Ah yeah look a bit more - no one ever follows that procedure (or what crazy system design allows that type of error to be possible): European Blackout: Human Error-Not.

Related: Visual Work Instructions - Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame - variation description

June 6, 2007

Lean Progress at Label Printing Companies

Continuous Improvement, an article from the Label and Narrow Web trade magazine (”for the narrow web segment of converting and printing”), is an article with some nice anecdotes of successfully applying lean thinking.

“The dollar ramifications are huge. We pay bills in 10 days now because we have fewer bills to pay, and now we have discounts. We made back the money we paid last year in interest on our credit line because we have so much less inventory. In 18 months we took our inventory from well over $400,000 to under $200,000, and in those 18 months the company grew 20 percent.

“The next area we focused on was our press benches. We got rid of everybody’s tool boxes and standardized. No other tools in the building. We went on a shopping spree at Home Depot, we moved out extra work benches, set up shadow boards, and mounted all the new tools on them. If a tool is missing at the end of a week they pay for it. We cleaned up the floors, and now the shop is really open and clean looking. The next step is to put up modular walls and install air conditioning.”

Luminer Converting has been assisted in its Lean venture by the New Jersey Manufacturing Extension Program; similar operations exist in almost all US states. “Through them we received a grant which paid for 90 percent of the consultancy fees we incurred,” Spina notes.

via: Lean Printing - a new lean blog

Related: It’s Easy Being Lean - Wisconsin Manufacturing - lean manufacturing articles - Transforming With Lean
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May 21, 2007

Kaizen

Great post - Do Kaizen Like Toyota:

Standardize how you solve problems… This is where following a standardized approach to problem solving based on the scientific method can help keep your kaizen efforts on track. Not to be prescriptive, but the PDCA wheel is hard to beat.

Very true.

April 29, 2007

Standardized Work Instructions

Standardized work instructions are in important part of Deming and lean manufacturing management systems. Processes need to be standardized and continually improved (kaizen). Without a documented standard process variation normally increases over time as processes drift away from the desired standard. As new ideas for improved are proposed those changes can be tested using PDSA and adopted if successful.

The key is not having a document saying this is what the standard process is, the key is having a document that is actually used. For that reason it is essential that the work instructions are easy to use (visible and as simple as possible) and easy to update (to avoid the common problem of the process changing and the work instructions losing touch with what is actually done).

Resources on standard work instructions:

April 18, 2007

Learning Lean: A Survey of Industry Lean Needs

A draft version of Learning Lean: A Survey of Industry Lean Needs by Gene Fliedner and Kieran Mathieson is now available. This voice of the customer report is product of some of those involved in the Lean Education Academic Network. Conclusions:

We studied what business practitioners think graduates need to know about Lean. Our results showed that practitioners are not concerned about specific technical skills. Instead, they want graduates to possess a systems view of organizations and value streams. Implications for Lean education and a broader systems approach to professional education in general, are considered.

I think it is an interesting read.

Related: Applying Lean Tools to University Courses - Lean Education Academic Network Spring Meeting - Applied Quality Engineering Education - voice of the customer

March 18, 2007

Experiment and Learn

Experimenting with milkshakes?

I have been on a mission to convince firms to do simple experiments that will give them feedback regarding the decisions that they make. Just as with people (as Anders Ericsson studies), firms cannot learn with feedback. It turns out, however, that it is not easy for people in companies to see the wisdom in experiments.

Experiments are useful and underused. PDSA and design of experiments are two concepts that aid in experimenting successfully.

Related: Google: Experiment Quickly and Often - Why Use Designed Factorial Experiments? - Using Design of Experiments - theory of knowledge

March 9, 2007

Kanban In Software Engineering

Kanban in Action:

The kanban system allows us to deliver on my 3 elements of my recipe for success: reduce work-in-progress (in fact it limits it completely); balance capacity against demand (as new CRs [change requests] can only be introduced when a kanban card frees up after a release); and prioritize. We hold a business prioritization meeting once per week with vice presidents from around the company. They get to pick new CRs from the backlog to allocate against free kanban cards. This forces them to think about the one, two, or three most important things for them to get done now. It forces prioritization.

Another interesting application of management improvement concepts in software development by David Anderson.

Related: Management Science for Software Engineering - Microsoft CMMI - Innovation in Software Development Process - Lean and Theory of Constraints - Kanban definition

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