The company has seen that it could have missed a trick but for PDSA.

By reviewing the services that the company is capable of providing, it was seen that the leading of Lean Sigma training courses was an area that the company can excel in.

With the importance of Lean Sigma being appreciated more and more by all businesses – large and small – a starting point for all those wanting to learn about this philosophy is vital.

Therefore, View From The Hilltop (VFTH) has seen that it can provide training for Lean Sigma at an introductory level – or Lean Sigma ‘Yellow Belt’ level – for anyone wishing to understand Lean Sigma.

Please contact VFTH for further details.

For those of you who have faced the dreaded ‘Toddler Inquisition’ you will already be familiar with the concept of The 5 Whys:

Daddy, what is rain?

It is the water that comes down from the clouds.

Why?

The clouds are made of water.

Why?

The sun shines down on all the rivers and oceans and causes water to rise up into the sky to be made into clouds.

Why?

Because that is what water does when someting hot like the Sun heats it up.

Why?

Because that is how water is made.

Why?

Because….. Because… Isn’t it Tea Time?

In examining a business process, if a problem is identified and the explanation is then questionned with a ‘Why’ a point will eventually be reached when the definitive Root Cause of the problem will be identified.

The ‘Tea Time’ moment!

These are: Dr W. Edwards Deming, Walter A. Shewhart and Joseph M. Juran

W. Edwards Deming taught top management how to improve design (and thus service), product quality, testing, and sales (the last through global markets) through various methods, including the application of statistical methods.

His philosophy has been summarized as follows:

By adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations can increase quality and simultaneously reduce costs (by reducing waste, rework, staff attrition and litigation while increasing customer loyalty). The key is to practice continual improvement and think of manufacturing as a system, not as bits and pieces.

Walter Shewhart was an American physicist, engineer and statistician and is sometimes known as the father of statistical quality control

Shewhart’s work pointed out the importance of reducing variation in a manufacturing process and the understanding that continually adjusting a process through ‘knee-jerk’ reactions to problems actually increased variation and degraded quality.

He framed this solution in terms of assignable cause - causes created by how the process works, i.e., changes of work shift whereby one person may work faster than another, and chance cause variation – uncontollable factors, i.e., power cuts, bad weather preventing staff to get to work in time, and introduced the control chart as a tool for distinguishing between the two.

In 1938 his work came to the attention of W. Edwards Deming.

This encounter began a long collaboration between Shewhart and Deming that involved work on productivity during World War II and Deming’s championing of Shewhart’s ideas in Japan from 1950 onwards.

Deming developed some of Shewhart’s methodological proposals around scientific inference and named his synthesis the Shewhart cycle – the basis for Continuous Improvement.

Joseph M. Juran was a management consultant who is principally remembered as a pioneer for quality and quality management.

He is widely credited for adding the human dimension to quality management. He pushed for the education and training of managers. For Juran, human relations problems were the ones to isolate. Resistance to change—or, in his terms, cultural resistance—was the root cause of quality issues.

Juran’s vision of quality management extended well outside the walls of the factory to encompass non-manufacturing processes, especially those that might be thought of as service related

Juran developed an approach that is composed of three managerial processes: quality planning, quality control and quality improvement – known as the ‘Juran Trilogy’

As a result of this approach, it was seen that without change, there will be a constant waste, but during change there will be increased costs. However, after improvement, profit margins grow higher enabling the initial ‘costs of change’ to be recouped. Once this happens, then the real profits for the business process can materialise.

SIPOC is an acronym for:
Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs and CUSTOMERS. A SIPOC is completed most easily by starting from the right (“Customers”) and working towards the left. In other words:

CUSTOMERS, Outputs, Process, Inputs and Suppliers

or COPIS. Simple.

A SIPOC/COPIS diagram is a tool used by a team to identify all relevant elements of a process improvement project before work begins. It helps to define a complex project that may not have been well scoped.
It is related to the Process Mapping of a business process.

The tool name prompts the team to consider the Suppliers (the ‘S’ in SIPOC) of your process, the Inputs (the ‘I’) to the process, the Process (the ‘P’) your team is improving, the Outputs (the ‘O’) of the process, and the Customers (the ‘C’) that receive the process outputs. In some cases, Requirements of the Customers can be appended to the end of the SIPOC for further detail.

The SIPOC tool is particularly useful when the following are not clear:
•Who supplies Inputs to the process?
•What specifications are placed on the Inputs?
•Who are the true Customers of the process?
•What are the Requirements of the customers?

Therefore, if a SIPOC were to be used in the preparation of meals listed on a restaurant menu:
Suppliers – grocers and vendors
Inputs – ingredients for recipes as provided by the Suppliers.
Process – How ingredients are cooked in the restaurant kitchen in order to match the meals listed in the menu.
Outputs – the meals served as requested by the CUSTOMERS
CUSTOMERS – diners at a restaurant. Their requirements are their choices from the menu, how many items and – if there is an option – how they are to be cooked.

The most variable and varied part of a SIPOC are the Process and the CUSTOMERS components respectively.

The Process is variable because there may be a wide range of cooking requirements needed to meet the range of meals on the menu – unless, of course, the menu just consists of cheese and pickle sandwiches!

The CUSTOMERS are varied as their choices from the menu are totally unknown until their orders are taken. As mentioned above, these orders can be further varied by particular requirements or requests:

‘Do you have Brie or Cheddar cheese in your sandwiches?’
‘We have a selection of both, madam’
‘Both? Well, I would like a round of Brie sandwiches and two rounds of Cheddar with more pickle in the Cheddar sandwiches than in the Brie.’
‘Certainly, madam.’
‘Do you have onion in the pickle?’
‘But of course, madam!’
‘I don’t like onion – could you please pick all the bits of onion out for me?
‘Yess, madam!’
‘Oh, and I would like the Brie on brown bread and the Cheese in a toasted baguette!’
‘As you wish, madam. Will THAT be ALL?’
‘For now, my good man. For now’

There is no operatic connection nor do they refer to any form of ventriloquism.

No, the Three Voices are:

Voice of the Customer
Voice of the Process and
Voice of the People

whereby:

The Voice of the Customer – A detailed insight into customer needs, wants, perceptions, and preferences gained through direct and indirect questioning, such as questionnaires, focus groups and other means of feedback.
This insight is then used to design the appropriate processes within a business to help close the gap between customer expectations and the end-product or service provided by that business. As this gap closes further, so customer satisfaction increases also.
When this insight is used intuitively, the needs of the customer can almost be predicted – providing additional aspects to an end-product or service that will literally surprise and even delight the customer.

Voice of The Process – The data generated by quality control measures within the business processes, indicating how stable or unstable the process actually is.
In other words, this information explains how well the process is performing in order to meet the specific demands made by the customer.
The Voice of the Process also highlights where in the process certain faults may lie and how they may be occuring.

Voice of The People – This is the human voice within the business and effectively consists of the Voice of The Business (VOB) and The Voice of The Employee (VOE)
VOB – A summary of all needs related to a business and its stakeholders, including profitability, revenue, growth and market share. Encompassing needs both spoken and unspoken, the voice of the business establishes the goals and defines success within the necessary processes.
It is the VOB that focusses on the changes and improvements required within current business practices and processes in order to meet the desired goals – shaped, in turn, by customer demand.
VOE – The needs, desires, hopes and preferences of all employees within an organization. This voice takes into account the spoken needs, such as wages, health care and pension plans, aswell as the unspoken needs of job satisfaction and the respect of their coworkers and supervisors.
It is the voice of the employee that helps to determine the manner in which the voice of the business is able to achieve its goals.

There is Lean, Lean Six Sigma and Lean Sigma. There is also Six Sigma out on its own!

Despite this, all these terms have one single thing in common: The reduction of wasteful processes from within a system, enabling an increase in customer satisfaction in the form of increased value for the customer.

So, for some Thumbnail sketch definitions……

Lean: When resources within a process fail to provide value for the customer they are considered wasteful and become candidates for either redesigning or elimination.
Therefore, Lean is the focussing of resources within a process on both the preservation of value and the elimination of needless work.

Six Sigma: This seeks to improve the quality of any process by identifying and removing the defects or errors that cause changes within that process.
Six Sigma essentially uses statistical analysis whereby the quality of a process can be described by its sigma rating – or the percentage of defect-free products that the process produces.
A ‘six sigma’ process is one in which 99.99966% of all products are defect-free within a sample of one million.

Lean Six Sigma: This is when the concepts of Lean and Six Sigma are combined to create a process that not only reduces the wasteful use of resources but also produces defect-free products at a rate of 99.99966% per one million!

And, finally, my favoured shade of Lean – Lean Sigma: This is when the concepts of Lean and Six Sigma are again combined to again create a process that reduces the wasteful use of resources. But this time, the level of defect-free products rate at 93.3% per one million products.

This may seem a lot lower, but for most business processes a high value success rate of over 93% for all products can still be considered as exceptional

Amongst the shoes and clothes, there is also a tape measure, a wall mirror, a standard lamp, a hat stand and a rubber plant!

So what, I hear you ask…

Well, Lean Sigma also contains just such a similar collection of essential and varied tools, vital to unlocking the potential of any business’s improved performance.

I just added the carpet bag as Lean Sigma doesn’t normally come with one…

And so, dear readers, ‘View From The Hilltop’ was born.

A hilltop not only provides the best of all views but also a wonderful opportunity to think calmly and reflect in fresh, clean air. This calm inspiration is vital for any business that wishes to run freely – and not find itself running through treacle.

But how can the process minutiae of a business be seen from as far away as a hilltop? Well, the truth is…  It can’t.

The hilltop only provides the overview, the big picture, the whole shebang. It is also the starting point of the Lean Sigma journey to identifying any processes that need improving.

It is the start to Travelling Down The Hill.

As the journey downward begins, so the intricacies of the processes can be seen closer, in greater detail. They become clearer.

Finally, the closest possible observations made are those made at the foot of the hill.  But has the journey of improvement now ended? Not at all.

It has only just begun

Although the terms Lean and Lean Sigma have been around for about 20 years, processes that would now be considered as Lean include the style of ship-building pioneered in the Italian city of Venice as far back as the 1100s!

‘It (a system) needs less of everything to create a given amount of value, so lets call it LEAN’

John Krafcik (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987)