2-2.4 Starting a Six Sigma Project

Loading...

From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Process Improvement

298 ratings

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Process Improvement

298 ratings

Course 4 of 7 in the Specialization Value Chain Management

In this course you will focus on process improvement. You will learn how to set organizational priorities for continuous process improvement, how to execute process improvement projects, and how to sustain the initiative for continuous improvements. Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to: • Understand the roles of process improvement • Relate underlying principles to frameworks and techniques used for process improvement • Synthesize information to make decisions for organizational initiatives and process improvement • Apply analytical techniques for tactical decisions in a process improvement project This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price. For more information, please see the Resource page in this course and onlinemba.illinois.edu.

From the lesson

Module 2: Managing the Continuous Improvement Initiative

Module 2 presents the organizational infrastructure needed for managing Lean and Six Sigma process improvement initiatives and describes techniques for aligning business strategy with continuous improvement. In this module, you will also learn about value stream maps and project charters as techniques for getting started with process improvement projects.

2-2.1 Lesson Objectives1:24

Starting a Lean Project13:46

2-2.2b Starting a Lean Project13:03

2-2.3a Value Stream Mapping Part 111:53

2-2.3b Value Stream Mapping Part 117:17

2-2.3 Value Stream Mapping Part 237:40

2-2.4 Starting a Six Sigma Project21:09

2-2.5 Lesson Recap1:30

Meet the Instructors

Gopesh Anand
Associate Professor of Business Administration
Department of Business Administration, College of Business

[MUSIC]

This session is about the Define phase of a Six Sigma project, so

when we think about Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control,

here we're going to talk about what happens in the Define phase.

What are the different techniques that get used in the Define phase,

and what are we trying to accomplish in a Define phase?

So in the Define phase of a project, we're trying to form up the objectives.

What are the goals of the project?

What kind of performance improvement are we trying to achieve, and

be more specific about it.

So Six Sigma is all about being specific about the goals,

to the extent that you can come up with a monetary value,

whether it's in dollars or euros or pounds or rupees.

It's what kind of monetary value are we going to get from doing this project, in

that sense, a benefit cost analysis off of what we're going to get from this project.

And in the Define phase,

you also have to establish the rules that will be used to conduct this project.

Who are going to be the team members?

What kind of time commitment are they going to have for this particular project?

Are they going to be working full time on this project or

they continue to do the other things that they do in the organization?

And those are the kind of things that have to be established before a project

gets started.

A good Define stage in a project would include dates in

terms of when the Define phase was expected to get completed.

And then when each of the other phases is expected to get completed.

It would also have some kind of sign off for each stage.

And what are the responsibilities of the different team members that are going

to be participating in that team for that Six Sigma project?

What you also want to take care of in the Define phase is the fact that you

may have some support processes that might be required.

So are they going to be support processes that need to help?

And are they gonna be part of a team?

Or are they simply going to remain outside the team and provide the support?

So if there's any support from the facility's department,

in terms of having to move equipment.

If there's gonna be any support form the information systems department.

In terms of software that needs to be developed for any kind of data collection

or solutions that you might come up with from this project.

Then that needs to be incorporated in the Define phase.

And what you have at the end of a Define phase is a deliverable,

which is a project charter.

And we'll see what a project charter is toward the end of the session.

And that's a deliverable that becomes like a contract that it is talking about

all these things.

What are the objectives?

What are the team members?

And what those team members will be doing on this project?

So let's take a look at some concepts that you want to use when

you are trying to define the objectives of a project.

So the first concept here is the idea of customer needs.

You want to to think about who is the customer of the process.

And this particular way of thinking about

customer needs is about external customers.

So the Kano model of customer needs talks about customers from an external

customers perspective and divides up the needs of customers into three categories.

The first category is dissatisfiers.

So what does dissatisfiers mean?

These are features of a product that if the customer does not have,

they will be very dissatisfied, they will be disappointed.

And you can think of these as even being order qualifiers.

So you may have heard of the term called order qualifiers, so

you can think of these terms as being order qualifiers.

These are things that if the customer does not get from your product or process,

they're not even going to consider you as a provider for the product or process.

So here, I have an example that I'm gonna use throughout the three types of customer

needs that we're focusing on in the Kano model, and the examples of a car.

So what would be a dissatisfier for a car?

If it's not safe,

then it's going to be something that no consumer would want to consider.

So safety would be an essential aspect of a car.

Moving on to satisfiers, things that the customer expects,

but more the better, right?

So it's something that they're going to have express requirements of,

and the more you can give them of that particular feature, the better.

So fuel consumption is one that comes to mind

right off the bat when you're thinking about buying a car

that the better the fuel consumption the better it's going to be for any customer.

So that's sort of a linear relationship when you're talking about

what this particular feature is, and the level of satisfaction of the customer.

Better fuel consumption, higher satisfaction.

The third category of customer needs when you're thinking about the Kano model is

the delighters, the exciters.

These are aspects that a customer may not be expecting from your particular

product or process, but they might be things that the customer would value

if you would actually give it to them.

So for example, if you're thinking about a car and

you're thinking about collision sensors that you're providing in the car,

at no extra cost, that would be important right?

If you're going to charge for those things,

then that's going to take away from solving the customer need at a price,

then, you wanna give it to them at no extra cost.

Which would say that you're getting this extra value from this product.

And that would delight the customer.

So once again,

you can think of dissatisfiers as being your order qualifiers and

exciters on the other extreme of the KANO model, could be your order winners.

They are the aspects of your product or process that will help

you win customers over from competitors based on something that customers value.

Now what you'll notice about these aspects when you start thinking about them

is that over time, what will happen to exciters and

delighters is they will become dissatisfiers, right?

They will be things that customers expect.

So if you're thinking about a cell phone for example, a different example from

a car, a cell phone and you think about cameras in a cell phone.

They're no longer something that are exciters for customers who are looking for

a cell phone.

In fact if you don't have a camera, and a decent camera at that,

it becomes a dissatisfier.

It would not even be considered by a customer when they're looking for

cell phones.

So when you have exciters and

delighters, you want to keep an eye on whether they remain exciters and

delighters over time, or they become satisfiers, and eventually dissatisfiers.

So, that's a perspective that you want to keep in mind over time,

that this is going to be dynamic.

A way of thinking about getting to what is it that the customer actually

wants from product or a process, is this idea of a voice of the customer analysis.

So we take voice of the customer, and

here we're talking about a customer need of providing good room service.

So, a customer says if you talk to a customer,

what do you like from coming to this hotel?

I like the fact that it gives me good room service or

I expect good room service when I come to stay at this hotel.

So you say, well What is the dryware for this particular kind of customer service?

So, providing with good room service would require from an observations perspective,

from a process perspective, delivering quickly.

That's what we need to deliver from a process.

If the customer is going to get good room service.

So, what do we need to do with that when we're thinking about this in terms of

a process, metric, or a metric for a six sigma project is

we need to convert that into a standard It's critical to quality.

So, going from voice of customers, saying what does the customer want to what is

critical to quality characteristic of the process, and there we wanna get more and

more specific and more and more precise, as precise as we can get.

So here, we use the example of a customer need of a good room service,

translating into good delivery times,

delivering quickly, and getting more specific delivered within 30 minutes.

So, it's that specific that it should be delivered within 30 minutes.

Which, then, obviously gives us the definition of a defect,

which a defect is if it's not delivered within 30 minutes, it's a defect.

So, we've gone from a subjective voice of the customer to an objective definition

of Critical to Quality characteristic and an objective definition of a defect.

And that's the idea that you want

to pursue in any aspect of a product or process.

Especially, when you're talking about Six Sigma.

Another technique that gets used when we're talking about the define phase of

a Six Sigma project, is what is called a SIPOC diagram or the SIPOC Analysis.

And that starts from the suppliers and goes all the way to the customers with

the, Inputs, process, outputs, being the steps in the middle.

So here, we have an an example of getting steel watch cases electroplated.

So, what do we have as the suppliers?

We've got the steel, the different minerals that are needed for

electroplating, the different chemicals, and then, we have some kind of

cleaning service that is taking care of doing some of the cleaning for

the watch cases before they go into the electroplating.

What we have is the inputs is the steel watch cases.

What we have as the process and typicall,y what you do in the SIPOC diagram

is you depict the process as a box but

then, you break it down into its different steps base on a process map.

And instead of a process map,

you could also be thinking of a While you stream map.

Or you could be thinking of a flow chart.

So, any kind of a process map that is going to depict the process

is what are you going to include in that SIPOC diagram.

So here, we've broken down the process of electroplating to stamping,

dipping tanks, scuff, and inspect.

Those are the four steps of the process map is made up of.

Next you have the output, which are the electroplated cases, and then,

they are going to the customer and the customer in this case is the assembly line

that's going to assemble the watches with the cases that they're using from here.

So, a SIPOC diagram helps you to think about points at which there

might be defects because then you can think about, well, is it from the input,

is it from the supplier, the input or steps in the process map or

is it from how we are Delivering the output to the customers.

And it helps you think about these from a systematic way when you're

looking at each of the steps in the SIPOC, and each of the steps in the process.

Alright, next, when you're thinking about the define phase

what needs to be done is you need to get an estimate, so like we said in Six Sigma

there's going to be some sense of what is this project going to bring to us.

What is it going to bring to the company in terms of increasing sales,

reducing inventory?

Is it going to reduce costs in some way?

Is it going to improve the cycle time?

Is it going to improve the turn-around time?

Time for customer orders.

What is it going to get us?

So, it's gonna get us some benefits but they are gonna be some costs involved in

it, and here, you have an example of simply time of

the different people who are working on that project team.

So, yo have the black belt, the green belt, and then,

you have various team members.

In this case we're still talking about that,

Electroplating project that we use as an example for

the [INAUDIBLE] and you have different people working on this project.

So, you have line supervisor, the Maintenance manager, the Line worker,

and then, you also have Procurement and HR manager because they might have

some kind of say in terms of What changes can be made to the process.

But the idea here is that you're getting an estimate

in terms of the time that they're going to spend.

If there are other expenses that need to be included,

those can be added to the time costs of the people.

Here you have something that is useful for

any kind of project planning, a Gantt chart.

And a Gantt char is basically,

giving you a sense of what are the different steps that need to be done.

So, on the left side you have define, measure, analyze, improve,

control as the five standards steps of the Six Sigma projects, and then, what you

have right next to it is who has got responsibility for getting that part done.

So, in this particular case, we are talking about the same example

of the Electroplating Project that we started off from the sipoc diagram.

So, in this particular case the black belt,

the Six Sigma black belt has a responsibility for the defined phase.

And then, somebody else has a responsibility for measure phase, and

then, we go on in going through the different phases.

So, the Gantt Chart has not only the responsibilities, but moving on

to the right part of this, then, you have, this project is expected to take 22 weeks.

And are there going to be parallel times for any two phases?

So here, you can see that in the eighth week, the measure phase and

the, the analyse phase, there's an overlap there.

That may be there for a particular reason.

And then, toward the end you see that there's an overlap between the improve and

the control phase.

So, the Gantt Chat is used in a sense to map out what are the different

activities that will be done in parallel and together.

And then, in this particular case, what I've shown over here

Is that there might be multiple projects that this particular six sigma black belt,

Katrina Chang might be dealing with.

So, she might have other projects that are listed

below this in terms of where they will be in these particular weeks.

Just to get a sense of what kind of work load she's expecting and

what needs to get done before something else.

And this could even flow into projects that have to be done sequence

one after the other.

So, when do you expect one to get done, and the other to get started, and

so ,on and so forth.

Now finally, as a deliverable from a six Sigma define phase,

from the define phase of a [INAUDIBLE] project.

The most important deliverable is the project charter.

And once again, I've stuck to the same example,

the made up example of the electroplating defects project

to give you a sense of what a project charter contains.

So here, you have the business case being made, why should we do this project,

what does it mean?

So, if you think back to strategy deployment this is where you're connection

all of this to what is the operation strategy, the business strategy.

Of the company.

Now, obviously you can see that when you're talking about the business case and

trying to connect it, you can use a X Matrix too, to come up with the business

case and use that as a supplement to talk about the business case.

Because that will connect the operation strategy the business strategy explicitly

to what the project is trying to achieve.

So, what do you have next in this project charter is a problem statement,

what is it exactly that is the problem?

So 33% of watch cases have to be reworked in to electroplating and

that's a very high percentage.

These defects are hurting capacity utilization and

costing roughly 250,000 per month for rework.

So now we have a sense of how much it is costing for

rework and there can be a benefit to cost analysis.

Are the costs of this project going to be worth it and

when you look back to what we saw in terms of the time cost

$250,000 being the expected

benefit that you can get from this project, will make this project worth it.

Next you have, on the project charter, the growth statement and

here you can have sigma levels, right?

You can be saying this incoming process is at a certain level of Sigma,

is at a two point five level of Sigma and

we're trying to go to a three point five level of sigma.

Or you can be stating it in different terms.

In here I've stated it in terms of reducing errors to less than 20%.

So from 33% to less than 20% and cutting down reworked costs

which were originally at 250,000 to 75,000 and

by the date of March 31st next year.

So that's the date that's being targeted for this goal to be achieved.

What you also have in the project charter are constraints and assumptions.

So what are some of the things that we can assume,

and what are some of the things that we cannot do?

So the constraints are team members can only devote a maximum of 25% of their time

to the project, and the project must be completed in 120 days.

Now these constraints might be specific to this project, or

they might be constraints that are applied to all projects at a certain level.

So all Six Sigma projects, all black belt projects might have a certain

restriction in terms of number of days.

Which is not to say that you don't wanna solve a problem that takes a long time,

except what the company might be talking about there

is that they might want to break up the project if it's too long.

So that might be the idea,

because you don't want a project to go on forever you want to break it up.

And the cliche that gets used when we're talking about project charters is that,

you don't want to try to solve world hunger with a project,

you want to take something that is manageable through a project and

then work on that before you move on to the next project, right?

So next, we have after constraints and assumptions, the risks and dependencies.

What are some of the other processes that might get affected

when you do this project?

So one of the dependencies that we have with this particular electroplating

defects project.

Is that the cleaning process that is before and

after electroplating is currently being outsourced.

So if there are going to be impacts of that on the defect rate.

And we're not saying that that's the case right now,

but that's something to keep in mind.

That's something to try and analyze and keep in mind, whether that's going to

be a decision that can be taken within the scope of this project,

whether we can bring the cleaning process in house or

whether that outsourcing decision is out of scope for this project.

And that's just a given that has to be taken going forward.

So that's the left side of this project charter.

On the right side you have the information about the team.

So you have the different team members that are mentioned.

And then, you may also have guidelines for how the team is going to make decisions.

So here you have specific timings for

the meetings being mentioned it's going to be on a certain day at a certain time, but

you can also have rules for how decisions are going to be made.

Is it always going to be by consensus, is it going to be by majority, and

is it going to be by tie breaker from the team leader?

And that's something that needs to be stated up front in terms of

how the team is going to move forward.

You don't want to get a team that gets locked into arguments and

never makes any decision.

And finally, you have as part of the project charter,

a project plan that is also reflected in the Gantt chart that we saw earlier,

which is that certain things are gonna be done by certain dates.

And then you have a control phase that's been completed by March 15th.

So that is before the targeted date that they had earlier of March 31st.

So this project is targeting March 15th as the end date,

giving a buffer about 15 days for that March 31st date.

So this would be your deliverable if you were to do this project.

This would be something that you would deliver.

That you would present at the end of your defined phase, in preparation for

moving on to the next phase, which would be measure phase.

Explore our Catalog

Join for free and get personalized recommendations, updates and offers.

Coursera provides universal access to the world’s best education, partnering with top universities and organizations to offer courses online.

© 2018 Coursera Inc. All rights reserved.

Download on the App Store

Get it on Google Play