Page 302 - Design for Six Sigma for Service (Six SIGMA Operational Methods)

270 Chapter Nine

• Provide 24-hour car service operation—evening pick-up and return of
serviced car by breakfast the following morning (garage perspective).
• “The power of a waterfall is nothing but a lot of drips working
together.”(Leigh et al. 1993)

B. Eliminate All Idle or Intermittent Actions or Work
• Multiskilling to enable working in bottleneck functions to improve
work flow.
• Conduct training during pauses in work.
• Institute 24-hour shift patterns.
• “Life-long learning.”
• “The more I practice, the luckier I get”—Gary Player.

Principle 21. Skipping

Conduct a Process or Certain Stages (e.g., Destructive, Harmful, or Hazardous
Operations) at High Speed
• “Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy”—Nicholas Negreponte,
MIT Media Lab (Peters 1997).
• “Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a
chasm in two small jumps”—David Lloyd George.
• “Fail fast; learn fast.”
• Fast cycle—full participation—a method of involving the whole
organization simultaneously and rapidly in a major change, such as a
reorganization.
• Get through painful processes quickly (e.g., firing someone).
• Use rapid prototyping.
• “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate”—J. R. Watson, IBM
founder.

Principle 22. Blessing in Disguise or Turn Lemons into Lemonade
A. Use Harmful Factors (Particularly, Harmful Effects of the Environment or
Surroundings) to Achieve a Positive Effect

• Recast an attack on you as an attack on the problem.
• Making a fuss over customers who have experienced a problem with
your goods or services tends to reinforce their overall positive feeling
about you—to a level greater than that when no problem had occurred.
• Collect information to understand the harm, and then formulate a
positive action to remove it.
• Use the provocations method of encouraging new ideas.
• “The Extra Mile will have no traffic jams”—Unknown.