Improving your process
Now you’ve identified the root cause of the problem, you can begin to generate improvement ideas to help solve it. Improve, however, involves three distinct phases:
1 Generate ideas about possible solutions.The solution may be evident from the work done in the previous two steps. Make sure that your proposed solutions address the problem and its cause.
2 Select the most appropriate solution.Take account of the results from any testing or piloting, and the criteria you’ve identified as important, such as customer priorities, cost, speed, or ease of implementation. Ensure your solution addresses the problem and that customers will see a difference if you adopt it.
3 Plan and test the solution.This step seeks to ensure the smooth implementation of your chosen solution. Focus on prevention here can help you to avoid implementing a solution that causes problems elsewhere. Carrying out a pilot or a test is likely to be helpful.
Coming up with a control plan
After the Improve phase, you need to implement the solution in a way that ensures you make the gains you expected and hold onto them. If you’re to continue your efforts in reducing variation and cutting out waste, the changes being made to the process need to be consistently deployed and followed.
If the improvement team is handing over the “new” process to the process team, the handover needs to ensure that everyone understands who’s responsible for what and when. Misunderstandings are all too easy, and a clear cut-off point must exist signaling the end of the improvement team’s role. A control plan should be developed to ensure that the gain is secured and the new process effectively deployed.
The control plan helps to ensure that the process is carried out consistently. It also identifies key points in the process where measurement data is needed, plus highlights what action is required depending on the results. Ensuring you have the right ongoing measures in place is extremely important. Chapter 18 includes information on key Control phase tools, including the Process Management Chart.
Reviewing Your DMAIC Phases
Informal reviews of the progress of your improvement project on a weekly or even daily basis may be very sensible. These reviews involve the improvement team and the champion or sponsor. You could consider using aspects of the Agile scrum process outlined in Chapter 16.
As a minimum, you should conduct a formal tollgate review at the end of each DMAIC phase. A tollgate review checks that you have completed the current phase properly and reviews the team’s various outputs from it. The improvement team leader and the sponsor or champion of the improvement activity should conduct this review. In effect, you’re passing through a tollgate.
Before moving from one phase to another, stepping back, assessing progress and asking some key questions is crucial. For example:
How are things going? For instance, is the team working well together?
Are we on course?
What have we discovered?
What went well? Why?
What conclusions can we draw?
The tollgates also provide an opportunity to update your improvement charter and storyboard. Doing so pulls together some of the key elements of your project; for example, a picture of the process and a control chart showing performance. The tollgate also enables you to take stock of the benefits accruing and the financial details; for example, reductions in errors, improvements in processing time and customer satisfaction. In determining the benefits and financial details, ensure you record the assumptions behind your estimates or calculations, as you may need to explain these to others in the organization.
At the end of the Analyze phase, the tollgate review is of particular importance. It provides an opportunity to review the scope of your project; that is, how much improvement you’re seeking to achieve from it.
Before the project began, you may well have best-guessed a business case that justifies starting the work. By the end of this phase, you should be able to quantify the opportunity — to really understand the extent of non-value-adding activities and waste, and the potential for improvement. On completion of the Measure phase, you’re able to understand the current situation and level of performance. Following the Analyze phase, your level of understanding will have increased significantly and you’ll understand the root cause of the problem:
You know why performance is at the level it is.
You understand the costs involved in the process, both overall and at the individual step level.
You have identified the waste and the non-value-adding steps, including the extent of rework, and understood their impact on your ability to meet the CTQs.
In quantifying the opportunity, you first need to calculate the saving if all this waste and non-value-adding work were eliminated, making sure you document your assumptions. You may feel the opportunity is too small to bother about, or so large it justifies either widening the scope of the project or developing a phased approach, by breaking the task into several smaller projects, for example. Either way, review and agree your project goals now, sensibly estimating what’s possible for your project.
The benefits are reviewed again closely following your completion of the Improve phase. You’re looking to confirm the deliverables from the project, and secure authority for the solution to be fully implemented. As with quantify the opportunity, the post-Improve review also provides an opportunity to look at the project more generally, and key questions include the following:
Are we on course?
What have we discovered? And forgotten?
What went well? Why?
Can we apply the solution elsewhere?
What conclusions can we draw?
Confirming the benefits you expect to achieve is the main focus of this second benefits review; for example, in reduced rework or improved processing speeds. In completing the phase, you should feel confident that the chosen solution addresses the root cause of the identified problem, and ensures you meet the project goals. Management by fact is a key principle of Lean Six Sigma, so you should have appropriate measurement data and feel confident that your solution will deliver.
Quite a range of differing benefits may occur, including:
Reduced errors and waste
Faster cycle time
Improved customer satisfaction
Reduced cost
In assessing how well these benefits match the project objectives, bear in mind that quantifying the softer benefits of enhanced customer satisfaction may be difficult. And in projecting when the benefits are likely to emerge, don’t lose sight of the fact that a time gap will probably exist between the cause and effect, especially where customer satisfaction feedback and information is concerned.
As well as looking at the benefits, this review also confirms any costs associated with the solution and its implementation. The piloting or testing activity carried out in the Improve phase (see “Improving your process” earlier in this chapter) should have helped you pull this information together, provided you treated it as though it were a full-scale implementation. Internal guidelines will probably be available to help you assess and present the benefits and costs, but ensure you’ve documented the assumptions