Archives for the Lean Six Sigma category

Lean Six Sigma is used by businesses the world over as a means to improve quality and efficiency. Its impact on business cannot be overstated with everyone from Amazon to Vodafone adopting the principles.

What started in the manufacturing industry has since swept through the service, tech and financial sectors. It’s not just for corporate business either: governments and other public organisations have used Lean Six Sigma with enormous success. It’s even been used to control diabetes!

If you’d like to learn more about Six Sigma and how it can help your business, come on our Six Sigma Training.

It is though, somewhat surprising (although not illogical) news to learn that Lean Six Sigma has been used by US crime labs, to streamline and improve their processes.

Lack of Efficiency is a Crime

Last year, Monroe County Crime Lab in New York State was struggling with certain issues; it was:

• Unable to deal with its huge backlog of cases
• Not able to get the work done on each case fast enough
• Producing low quality reports

Something needed to be done and so with those issues at the forefront, from August to September 2012 the crime lab began testing the adoption of Lean Six Sigma principles in regard to its workflow.

Read the rest of "Lean Six Sigma in the Forensics Lab"

Posted by Andy Trainer in Lean Six Sigma, News on April 19th, 2013| 1 Comment »

We recently wrote about an American man who used Six Sigma to control his diabetes. It went to show that Six Sigma is gradually being recognised as a system that can be used beyond the workplace and especially for more than just manufacturing.

Six Sigma is all about improving the quality of processes and thereby the end result. Now if you’ve ever burnt your dinner or tried out a new recipe that has not quite ended up how you expected, you’ll know that cooking is an area in which quality can always be improved!

In this post then, we’re going to look at one of the main tenets of Six Sigma: the DMAIC method and see how it could be applied to kitchen to show how useful it is as process and demonstrate how it works.

If you prefer your Six Sigma with a side of business, take a look at our range of Six Sigma Courses - there’s one for any level of experience.

DMAIC in the Kitchen

So let’s say you’ve got a classic go-to meal that you just love cooking; I’ll use my own example of chilli con carne.

Read the rest of "Cooking With Six Sigma"

Posted by Andy Trainer in Lean Six Sigma, News on February 14th, 2013| No Comments »

When most people think of Six Sigma, they think of huge corporations implementing efficiency-boosting, waste-reducing policies that can mean savings of millions. They don’t really think of Six Sigma being used by their local Butcher!

Here’s the thing though: Six Sigma is ideal for small businesses and in this post we’ll explain why this is the case. In fact, it can even be used for things outside of business like controlling diabetes!

If you’d like to learn more about the processes involved and how to make them work for your business, come on one of our Six Sigma Training Courses.

Why Six Sigma?

So firstly let’s take a look at why Six Sigma is so useful for businesses of any size.

1/ Targets Waste and Costs

It’s inevitable that some waste and excess expenditure will be incurred in the running of a business. However, this shouldn’t prevent you from wanting to minimise both.

Six Sigma identifies where your business is spending too much or using too little from what you have and seeks to find ways to reduce the extent to which they eat into your profits. Read the rest of "Six Sigma For Small Businesses"

Posted by Andy Trainer in Lean Six Sigma, News on January 22nd, 2013| No Comments »

An American man who was diagnosed with diabetes used his experience with Six Sigma to control the disease.

William Howell discovered he had Type 2 diabetes and was understandably concerned – potential health risks from diabetes if left unmanaged include blindness, strokes and heart-attacks.

However, William was a Quality professional and was aware of Six Sigma’s framework for removing defects. By viewing his undesired symptoms as defects, he was able to use Six Sigma to bring his diabetes under control. You can read excerpts from William’s book about managing diabetes here.

If you want to learn more about Six Sigma, try our Six Sigma Training.

DMAIC Phases

Howell decided to divide his diabetes plan into the five DMAIC stages - define, measure, analyze, improve and control.

If you want to find out more about DMAIC and other Six Sigma terms, why not download our Lean Six Sigma Glossary.

This is how he used each stage of DMAIC to manage his illness:

• Define -  Howell created a goal statement. His symptoms were related to his high blood glucose level, so this was the first target – reduce the level to a healthier 125mg/dl or less. His other main goal was to control his symptoms naturally rather than continuing to depend on medication by improving his diet and exercising more.
• Measure – Howell continuously measured his blood glucose levels and charted his food intake, including calories, fat and sugar.
• Analyse – He would then analyse this data for trends – noticing any correspondence between a day of high calorie intake and high glucose levels, for example.
• Improve – Using his charts, he was able to notice any areas that he could improve upon to further his chance of achieving his goals. If his biggest contributor to high blood glucose levels was the days when he ate doughnuts for example, his chart would reflect this and he could make the appropriate alterations to his lifestyle.
• Control – By being completely aware of any changes and reasons for them, Howell was able to make constructive choices with the help of his doctor. Any aspects which were causing difficulty could be easily identified and addressed quickly. Read the rest of "Controlling Diabetes With Six Sigma"

Posted by Andy Trainer in Lean Six Sigma, News on December 11th, 2012| No Comments »

Theory of Constraints – identify & remove the bottleneck

What is the most effective way of improving my organisation?

Why does your organisation exist?

If it’s a commercial company, you want to make profits. If you are public sector or charity, then you want to apply your resources to best effect for your users.

Your business may be manufacturing (making widgets), information-processing (“transactional” such as finance and design) or service industry such as travel & transport, distribution, holidays and hotels.  To make money (profit) you need to have fast and efficient throughput of work from the start of the process to the customer.

What is Lean Six Sigma?

To improve flow of work and drive out waste (waste is anything you do that your customers won’t be happy paying for) many organisations use the highly effective tools of lean thinking. To reduce unwanted variation causing waste and troubling the customer we can use Six Sigma which is a powerful statistical toolkit. The combination of lean thinking and Six Sigma is Lean Six Sigma: widely and successfully used in very many organisations. Good training is available: for example, Silicon Beach Training offer Lean Training as well as Six Sigma Yellow Belt (three days), Green Belt (five days) and Black Belt Conversion (additional ten days).

Read the rest of "Theory of Constraints in Lean Six Sigma"

Posted by Andy Trainer in Lean Six Sigma, News on June 13th, 2012| No Comments »

There is a simple but effective technique for determining the root cause without resorting to the more complex tools and techniques included in the Analyse section of the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology – covered in depth on our Root Cause Analysis course as well as our Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Black Belt & Yellow Belt courses:

The 5 Whys

A question every parent and teacher will be very familiar with, asking why is a great way of winding people up. Every time you ask why, someone has to explain the last reason they gave – narrowing down or opening up the original statement until the asker is happy – which can go on for a long time with children.

What makes asking why a workable solution for determining the root cause of a problem?

• It is an easy tool that requires little statistical analysis
• You document each step of the analysis so you always know the path to the root cause
• The root cause is found more often that not
• Multiple root causes are often stumbled upon during the process

Why 5?

5 has been identified as the optimum number of whys needed to find the root cause of a problem. Most root causes are identified around the 5th question but some more complex problems lead to more questions being asked. Read the rest of "5 Whys: Simple Root Cause Analysis"

Posted by Andy Trainer in Lean Six Sigma, News on May 25th, 2012| No Comments »

Lean Six Sigma for knowledge workers and service processes

Do you work in a non-manufacturing group? If you are applying lean improvement methods but you don’t make goods then you probably supply a service or do “knowledge processing”. Lean thinking in these areas is often called “transactional lean”, “administrative lean”, and “lean for service”.

Non-manufacturing activities where lean methods have been used successfully include the following. You may well work in one of these areas:

• advertising
• entertainment
• financial services
• healthcare and hospitals
• hospitality and hotels
• insurance
• logistics and distribution
• marketing
• online services
• product design
• project management
• property sales
• travel and tourism
• public sector**

**the public sector (“state sector”) is 40% of the USA economy and about 50% of the UK and the EU economy.

Service industries are the largest part of Western economies

This is a table of percent of gross domestic product (GDP) Read the rest of "Lean Six Sigma for the Office and Service Industry"

Posted by Andy Trainer in Lean Six Sigma, News on January 20th, 2012| No Comments »

As part of our Lean Training and Six Sigma Training courses we often use Lean Games to illustrate key points.

As well as being a great Six Sigma training aid, if you’re trying to make a business case for adopting Lean or Six Sigma within your organisation, these games are a great way of demonstrating the benefits of Lean and Six Sigma Tools in a practical way.

If you’re interested in Six Sigma training, check out our Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Training course, which is suitable for anyone who will be leading a Six Sigma project. If you need more basic introductory training, our Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt course may be of interest.

Here we describe the Push-Line / Pull-Line Lean game…

Lean Game: Push-Line / Pull-Line

This Lean Game takes around 25-30 minutes to complete. It’s purpose is to highlight the advantages of the Lean approach to assembly lines (pull) over the batch approach (push). Read the rest of "Lean Game: Push-Line / Pull-Line"

Posted by Andy Trainer in Lean Six Sigma, News on May 24th, 2011| No Comments »