target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#i000031810000.jpg"/> Keep your eyes on the target to find tips and tricks we share to help you make the most of Lean Six Sigma.
Beyond This Book
In addition to the material in the print or e-book you’re reading right now, this book also comes with some access-anywhere goodies on the web. Check out the free Cheat Sheet at http://www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/leansixsigma for helpful information that you can access on a regular basis.
You can find some free articles online that expand on some of the concepts in the book. You can find links to the articles on the parts pages and on the Extras page at http://www.dummies.com/extras/leansixsigma.
Where to Go From Here
In theory, when you read you begin with ABC, and when you sing you begin with doh-ray-me (apologies to Julie Andrews). But with a For Dummies book you can begin where you like. Each part and, indeed, each chapter is self-contained, which means you can start with whichever parts or chapters interest you the most.
That said, if you’re new to the topic, starting at the beginning makes sense. Either way, lots of cross-referencing throughout the book helps you to see how things fit together and put them in the right context.
Part I
Getting Started with Lean Six Sigma
✔ Grasp the basics of Lean Thinking and Six Sigma so you can understand what they mean and what they don’t mean.
✔ Get a clearer picture of what the synergy created by merging the two disciplines into Lean Six Sigma looks like and understand the key principles underpinning the approach.
✔ Comprehend exactly what ‘sigma’ means and why the term is important in Lean Six Sigma.
✔ Examine in depth what the commonly used process improvement method known as DMAIC – Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control – means in Lean Six Sigma.
Chapter 1
Defining Lean Six Sigma
In This Chapter
▶ Turning up trumps for the Toyota Production System
▶ Finding out the fundamentals of ‘Lean’ and ‘Six Sigma’
▶ Applying Lean Six Sigma in your organisation
Throughout this book we cover the tools and techniques available to help you achieve real improvement in your organisation. In this chapter we aim to move you down a path of different thinking that gets your improvement taste buds tingling. We look at the main concepts behind Lean thinking and Six Sigma and introduce some of the terminology to help you on your way.
Introducing Lean Thinking
Lean thinking focuses on enhancing value for the customer by improving and smoothing the process flow (see Chapter 11) and eliminating waste (covered in Chapter 9). Since Henry Ford’s first production line, Lean thinking has evolved through a number of sources, and over many years, but much of the development has been led by Toyota through the Toyota Production System (TPS). Toyota built on Ford’s production ideas, moving from high volume, low variety, to high variety, low volume.
Although Lean thinking is usually seen as being a manufacturing concept and application, many of the tools and techniques were originally developed in service organisations. These include, for example, spaghetti diagrams, part of the organisation and methods toolkit, and the visual system used by supermarkets to replenish shelves. Indeed, it was a supermarket that helped shape the thinking behind the Toyota Production System. During a tour to General Motors and Ford, Kiichiro Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno visited Piggly Wiggly, an American supermarket, and noticed Just in Time and kanban being applied. This innovation enabled Piggly Wiggly customers to ‘buy what they need at any time’ and avoided the store holding excess stock. Kanban is simply a card providing the signal to order more stock. Incidentally, Piggly Wiggly was founded in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee by the innovative Clarence Saunders, who was also the first to introduce the concept of a self-service grocery shop.
Lean is called ‘Lean’ not because things are stripped to the bone. Lean isn’t a recipe for your organisation to slash its costs, although it will likely lead to reduced costs and better value for the customer. We trace the concept of the word ‘Lean’ back to 1987, when John Krafcik (who is joining Google to provide advice on the driverless car) was working as a researcher for MIT as part of the International Motor Vehicle Program. Krafcik needed a label for the TPS phenomenon that described what the system did. On a white board he wrote the performance attributes of the Toyota system compared with traditional mass production. TPS:
✔ Needed less human effort to design products and services.
✔ Required less investment for a given amount of production capacity.
✔ Created products with fewer delivered defects.
✔ Used fewer suppliers.
✔ Went from concept to launch, order to delivery and problem to repair in less time and with less human effort.
✔ Needed less inventory at every process step.
✔ Caused fewer employee injuries.
Krafcik commented:
It needs less of everything to create a given amount of value, so let’s call it Lean.
The Lean enterprise was born.
Figure 1-1 shows the Toyota Production System, highlighting various tools and Japanese Lean thinking terms that we use throughout this book. In this chapter we provide some brief descriptions to introduce the Lean basics and the TPS.
© John Morgan and Martin Brenig-Jones
Figure 1-1: The TPS house.
Toyota’s Taiichi Ohno describes the TPS approach very effectively:
All we are doing is looking at a timeline from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that timeline by removing the non-value-added wastes.
The TPS approach really is about understanding how the work gets done, finding ways of doing it better, smoother and faster, and closing the time gap between the start and end points of our processes. And it applies to any process. Whether you’re working in the public or private sector, in service, transactional or manufacturing processes really doesn’t matter.
Think about your own processes for a moment. Do you feel that some unnecessary steps or activities seem to waste time and effort?
We must point out, however, that simply adopting the tools and techniques of the