Six Sigma tools – Lean Six Sigma Group

What role does a Lean Team Coach play?

Reinier Tromp — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 08:59:08 +0000

The power of successfully implementing Lean in your organisation is motivation. It is important to inspire your employees. This actually may sound easier than it can be. Challenges arise in a culture of continuous improvement. The Lean Team Coach might be of great importance to reach the goals you want to. But how?

The Lean mindset

The Lean philosophy improves organisation by focusing on the customer. It is all about maximising customer value in processes. However, we do not define what is and what is not important. Our customers do. By taking into account what their requirements are, organisations should structure their processes. And do not forget your employees are the people with knowledge about how to do so. Because who knows better how to fulfill certain tasks in processes than those who have been doing so for years? However, it might be hard to enthuse and motivate your employees. This is where the Lean Team Coach might come in handy.

The role of the Lean Team Coach

Most of all, the Lean Team Coach focuses on improving collaboration.

Most organisations are divided in departments. The teams in these departments consist of employees with comparable tasks. Think of IT, human resources et cetera. However, this manner of organising companies leads to employees experiencing responsibility for their tasks instead of the entire organisation. And this results in competition between departments, instead of collaboration.

If you want to go fast, go alone

If you want to go far, go together!

– James Andeau –

Joint understanding

The Lean Team Coach helps teams to create insight in the organisation. By showing their influence they might be able to see the bigger picture. Employees are notified and know each other’s expectations. They then become able to create value for each other. What do your employees find important? How do they see quality and customer value? This will differ per team!

Structure en regularity

The Lean Team Coach plays a role in disciplinary work with Lean. He or she makes sure Lean stays within the focus of an organisation and motivates employees to begin with small steps to create structure in their work. This can be done by implementing day- or weekstarts.

Such a coach makes a difference…

…by strengthening the power of improvement that an organisation already possesses. The way in which processes have been structured often do not meet the customer’ requirements. In our experience, employees are not facilitated enough. They might be frustrated, because improvement seems unreachable. The Lean Team Coach supports the cycle of improvement and looks for a connection to be able to take the next step on your own organisational Lean journey.

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Customer value according to Lean

Sebastiaan Kooijman — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 12:28:23 +0000

As an organisation, you should improve continuously and keep developing in order to live up to the ever-changing environment regarding customer value. When handling according to agreements your company made about fulfilling the wishes of the customer, your organisation will do right. But what is this customer value? And how does Lean contribute to this?

What is customer value?

This term knows many definitions and there are many methods to determine this value as well. In relation to the Lean philosophy, the meaning behind customer value actually goes deeper than just this value. It means a product or service is delivered that satisfies the customer. He or she might choose to order from your company again.

But it is not the same thing as customer demand. Customer demand focuses on fulfilling the need of customers. However, often the customer him- or herself does not even know the need is there. The process of becoming conscious of these needs is important to companies. Here, you can gain customer value.

Why is creating customer value so important?

Creating customer value contributes to the growth of organisations. The ability to distinguish yourself as an organisation becomes more and more important with this market of competition. Simultaneously, customers are demanding more of products and services.

The increasing complexity and customers becoming more critical leads to a transition to a demand-economy. The focus is not on the current stock and how to reach the target group, but on what the target group wants and how to meet those requirements.

Organisations without commercial intent, think of schools or hospitals, have noticed the switch to the focus on customers. However, because the administrative work increases, some tasks of the core of the organisation have become really pressured. Even when looking at the government, it sometimes lacks focus on the ‘customer’, also known as citizens.

Every single one of these Dit vraagt om een significant andere benadering, waarbij problems have one thing in common: a switch towards customer needs should be made. Lean can contribute significantly to this.

How can customer value be improved?

Organisations know many ways to respond to customer needs. And these entail flexible processes that focus on the customer. The Lean philosophy supports with a structured approach that improve these processes.

While using tools and techniques that define the customer value, it becomes possible to examine which business processes supply added value. Those that do not should be minimised or even eliminated. Because in the long run, this will lead to more ‘spare’ time that can be applied to increase the customer value.

But keep in mind you should not only focus on the external customer. Every process has to do with a customer and these corresponding business processes create an output to colleagues or employees of other departments. When you, as an employee, see your own colleagues as (internal) customers as well, your collaboration will improve and intensify. Not only for you, but for your entire organisation and the external customers. This way, the common goal can be achieved: creating customer value.

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What is the KANO-model and why should it be used?

Sebastiaan Kooijman — Thu, 21 May 2020 08:30:15 +0000

As known, Lean Management is all about the customer. Your success rate is actually determined by the satisfaction of the customer. This is why you should listen to the so-called Voice-of-the-Customer. If you know which requirements the customer wants you as a company to meet, you can use the KANO-model to do so.

This model was first introduced by Noriako Kano in the ‘80s. The main takeaway of the model is the requirements that the customer would like to see in your product or service. Expectations, priorities and explicit needs are mapped by using the KANO model. This model plots two indicators in a graph. The x-axis is scaled from not filled in to filled in, whereas the y-axis goes from satisfied to unsatisfied (top to bottom). Three needs can be visualised in this graph, using these scalings, namely: basefactors, factors regarding performance and WOW-factors.

Basic Factors

These can simply be described as the basic needs of the customer. If these are not present, the customer is unable to be satisfied. They might be easy to overlook, but you should definitely invest time in them and take these very seriously. To give an example, think about a hotel room. Adding a bed seems obvious, but think about it from another perspective. In the case of forgetting the bad, could a customer still be satisfied?

Performance factors

Unlike the hotel room example, where adding more beds would not increase your customer’s satisfaction, less is not better when talking about performance factors. An example regarding the same example we just used would be the size of the hotel room. The bigger, the better, right?

WOW-factors

This is a special type of factors, considering the satisfaction of a customer will not be influenced when this type of factors is missing. Owing to the fact that these factors are meant to surprise the customer, because he or she did not expect it. Think about leaving a little piece of chocolate on the pillows of the hotel room, for example. In other words, WOW-factors leads to a positive result: increase of the customer satisfaction.

Applying the KANO-model

WOW-factors can turn into performance- or even basefactors over time. A great example would be Wi-Fi in your hotel room. A few years ago, this was a WOW-factor. However, a hotel without Wi-Fi is almost unthinkable nowadays. This means the WOW-factor has turned into a basefactor.

As a company or organisation, you should always focus on the basefactors and make sure these are taken care of. Your performance factors should be a going-on process and WOW-factors should be an extra. This will lead to customers being satisfied over-all, experiencing great service due to performance factors and being surprised once in a while because of your WOW-factors.

KANO-model and Lean projects

But what does the KANO-model have to do with Lean projects, I can hear you think. Lean projects focus entirely on the customer. Focus on obtaining useful input by surveys, interviews or other sources, which in turn can be used to create a KANO-model. The next step is to look for what your customers actually find important and what would be considered a WOW-factor. This can be done by filling in their wishes in your KANO-model and define each one of them as base-, performance- or WOW-factor. But keep in mind there is a difference between wishes and demands. In the example of the hotel, would adding a buffet be a wish or demand?

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Operational Excellence? Here’s what you need to know about it

Reinier Tromp — Thu, 21 May 2020 07:52:35 +0000

Many organisations want to achieve an advantage by being better than their competitors. This is often done by making sure their processes are handled more efficiently, or in other words: cheaper. By lessening the costs and upgrading the quality of their products or services, organisations are able to consolidate their position in the market. And quite frequently, the processes to achieve such goals are filed under ‘Operational Excellence’. But what actually is Operational Excellence? And to which extent does the Lean philosophy fit in there?

What is Operational Excellence?

As just stated, Operational Excellence creates the opportunity for organisations to distinguish themselves from their competitors by excellerate in production processes. It originates from the model “CUstomer Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines”, which was first mentioned by Treacy and Wiersema in 1993. And not only did they create Operational Excellence, but they also defined two strategies which lets organisations become able to specialise in Product Leadership or Customer Intimacy.

Operational Excellence makes sure organisations strive towards a service where a customer’s wishes take on a central role within all processes. This means everything that is produced, is delivered when was asked and at the pre-arranged price. Why? Because this results in customer satisfaction. And when customers are content, employees of the organisation will most likely be more productive, because they become motivated. This will lead to a decrease of the total costs.

Features

To be able to fulfill the philosophy that is called Operational Excellence, many organisations invest in Supply Chain Management. This type of management strives for in-time stock and quick delivery of products. Because as you were just able to read, Operational Excellence focuses on the needs of the customer instead of those of the organisation.

A feature of Operational Excellence is an organisation being task-oriented. This means no unnecessary work is done and data is collected. Through analyzing this data, organisations can make sure their business processes become more efficient.

If organisations choose to apply this philosophy, they are able to gain a competitive advantage. How, you ask? It is actually rather simple. Because they will manage to offer their products/services at a lower price, considering they optimized their business processes, their profit increases.

But what about Lean and Operational Excellence?

As you may have noticed does Operational Excellence actually have quite some things in common with Lean (Six Sigma). This is why Lean is actually the most used methodology to achieve Operational Excellence.

If you are a little hesitant on why they have so much in common, this is a little overview. Both methodologies strive towards improving processes of an organisation. Both choose to do so by using a programmatic approach to be able to realise these process improvements structurally. And continuous improvement takes on a central role in both of these philosophies.

By focusing on customer value, process steps and eliminating non-added value activities, operational processes can be continuously improved which will eventually lead to Operational Excellence. Using the knowledge and qualities of your employees and effectively apply technology and innovation will lead to an increase of productivity, which is basically another word for process efficiency, and a much more reliable process (outcome).

The following Figure is a house, which is called the Lean house. This is a visualisation of the system which describes Lean: process improvement. It focuses on customer value and standardisation by striving for the best quality and littlest lead time to result in a more efficient process and eventually lower total costs.

Operational Excellence is becoming more and more popular. But of course, if you want to apply this philosophy to your organisation, this will take more than just a snap of the fingers. It is important to make a change in behaviour. And not only does it take a long-term perspective to achieve these goals, it also requires perseverance. In other words, fully accepting, correctly applying and borrowing Operational Excellence within the entire organisation can actually take five to ten years.

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Why to apply Ishikawa? Here’s why!

Reinier Tromp — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 10:41:31 +0000

Why to apply Ishikawa? Here's why!

In this article, you will be able to find what Ishikawa is en the six reasons why you should apply it.

An approachable method to improve the quality of your organisation

The Ishikawa diagram is also known as the Fishbone model and the cause-and-effect diagram. To master your quality, there are seven tools you can use. This diagram is one of them. Getting to the center of the problem and solving it is the main aim of the Ishikawa diagram.

Brief history

In 1982, Kaoru Ishikawa was working at Kawasaki, which is known because of its motors. He noticed his colleagues getting frustrated because they felt unheard and powerless when failures arose. He then developed the Ishikawa diagram. A flaw can often be divided in more than one cause. One of the results is employees solving their own problems (thus bottom-up), because the main causes then become known. Nowadays, more and more organisations are looking for a method to trigger bottom-up problem solving, which is why Ishikawa is more relevant than ever.

Problem to solution

Planning a brainstorm session sometimes leads to unstructured meetings in which not everything is discussed. Using Ishikawa to structure your brainstorm may cause you to find causes to problems which had been unnoticed before.

Applying the Ishikawa diagram

It takes three steps to create an Ishikawa diagram:

Place the issue on the head of the fish;
Determine the main categories of the possible causes and then
determine the smaller causes by asking “why” or “is caused by..”.

Six reasons to apply Ishikawa diagrams:

When looking for possible causes within a process, solution, problem or situation;
If you want to look for the relation between different causes of a problem;
To come up with a suitable solution which covers the entire problem and not just part of it;
It is a team activity which leads to joint understanding of the problem;
To give your employees insight in the problem and give them the opportunity to influence the improvement of their own process;
When you are ready to initiate other projects within your organisation on your way to improvement;

The 6M Fishbone Model

There are many forms of the Ishikawa diagram available. However, the 6M Fishbone Model is the most common. The problem is divided into potential causes, which leads to the following categories: Methods, Machines, Men, Material, Measurements, Mother nature (environment). Sometimes, two more categories are added, namely Management and Maintenance.

Let's go!

As stated before, the Ishikawa diagram was actually conducted to involve employees in the process of improvement. This approachable method made realising progression possible by creating the opportunity to solve problems bottom-up. Start improving right away!

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How Little’s Law reduces your waiting time

Sebastiaan Kooijman — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 14:34:31 +0000

Little's Law

Little’s law is part of one of the most important aspects of Lean Six Sigma, namely the law of the waiting time. This law was first introduced by John Little and is still used when talking about management and logistics. Even in your daily life, the law is applicable.

For example, Imagine yourself being a hairdresser. The last thing you would want is your customers to wait before getting a haircut, because there is a chance they will go to another hairdresser, your competitor. To prevent this, make sure you know the ins and outs of your process, especially regarding waiting time and stock. Little’s law might help you achieving this.

After reading this article, you will know the grasp of Little’s law and how to utilise the law in a Lean Six Sigma Project.

Little proved a law which can be applied in situation including waiting time. The law considers three variables which tell you much about a process:

Stock (I)
Lead Time (T)
Throughput Rate (R)

If two of these variables are considered known, you can use Little’s law to compute the third variable.

Little’s law can be visualised as follows:

Stock (I) = (Throughput Rate (R) * LeadTime (T))

The formula can be paraphrased, after which the following two equation arise:

Throughput Rate (R) = (Stock(I) / LeadTime (T))

LeadTime (T) = (Stock (I) / Throughput Rate (R))

Before giving some examples, it might be helpful to understand what these variables actually mean.

Stock

This can also be called “Work In Process” (WIP). The term covers all products or customers that are involved with the process. In other words, it covers customers who are waiting or products who are being operated at that time. You could compare it to a line in a shop. The WIP is five, if the line itself contains four waiting customers. The person actually paying belongs to the WIP as well.

Leap Time

This entails the time between ordering a product and delivering it. Sometimes, it is called the Process Lead Time (PLT) as well. To calculate the leap time, keep in mind you should use the time of delivery instead of time of order. When holding onto the hairdresser example, it might become clearer. If it took the hairdresser fifteen minutes to start cutting your hair, which took thirty minutes, your PLT was eventually forty five minutes.

Throughput rate

This includes the flow of the number of products per unit of time. Take for example a hairdresser who is able to help one of his customers per half hour, then the throughput rate would be two per hour.

Little’s law applied to Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma focuses on creating as much value as possible for its customers and in addition eliminating activities which do not have a value for its customers. These non-added values are also called “muda” which is a synonym to “waste”.

Imagine yourself working at a company which produces four candles per week. In the same week, thirty orders are placed. This means the Lead time can be calculated:

LeadTime (T) = (Stock (I) / Throughput Rate (R))= (30 / 4) = 7.5 weeks

As shown above, the Lead Time entails seven and a half weeks according to Little’s law. You might find this rather long! By using Lean Six Sigma you improved the processes within your company. After a few weeks, your decide to check upon that. Fifteen orders have been placed, but in a week, five of these have been fulfilled. This means the following improvement has taken place:

LeadTime (T) = (Stock (I) / Throughput Rate (R))= (15 / 5)= 3 weeks

Little’s law hands you the opportunity to calculate the impact your improvement has (had). It enables you to trace back a few rules as will. Thus retaining stock during your process leads to an increase in the Lead Time; which you obviously want to prevent.

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Eliminating Muda, Muri and Mura; How to?

Sebastiaan Kooijman — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 09:04:14 +0000

Muda, Muri and Mura

Do you recognize the following scenario? Some days, you are feeling as if your workload may be heavier than your colleagues’. You can not find a moment of rest, whilst they can find many. It might be, you are suffering from Muda, Muri and Mura. These three Japanese terms concern the disruption of (business) processes and are unmissable within Lean.

Muda was introduced by Taiichi Ohno from Toyota and means waste. Taiichi deems there are seven different forms of waste, which are: transport, inventory, motion, waiting time, overproduction, overprocessing and defects. In other words, Muda is the comprehensive term of all these types of waste. ´Lost talent´ is another form of waste, which was added by Womack and Jones in their well-known book “The machine that changed the world”.

Lean aims at decreasing Muda, because not only are they able to evoke frustration within you and your colleagues, customers might have to deal with this as well.

The term Muri is often used to reason about situations where employees or machines are unable to digest the workload. A possible result is an accumulation of work. Another description in Lean-jargon is the “bottleneck”. This means the work pressure is higher than the work that can actually be processed. The entire pace of work is determined by this.

Mura can be described as a skewed distribution. An example has already been given, by the drawn scenario in the introduction. This uneven distributed workload is unfortunately common in many businesses. Take into account you suffer from Mura if your workload is unevenly distributed over your week as well.

Eliminating these three M’s creates a continuous, outbalanced business process, which accounts for a minimum of impediment of the process and a manageable workload for each employee as well as all machines.

But what influence do Muda, Muri and Mura actually have concerning your processes?

How can one achieve this, you ask? By creating a ‘flow’ and ‘pull’; two Lean principles. A flow is Centralizing the employee and focusing on a continuous culture of progress leads to an elimination of variation in the process. Together with discarding activities without clear capital gain and building in flexibility, the end of Muda, Muri and Mura can be reached.

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