Page 100 - Lean six sigma demystified

Chapter 2 Lean Demy StifieD 79

You’ll be surprised by the reusable assets you can develop and the speed and
quality with which you can serve your market.
Get the religion of reuse. It will help you grow your business, boost your
bottom line, and delight customers. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

? still struggling

Most new products (e.g., a car) are 80 percent standard parts and 20 percent
new ones. How can you maximize reuse of existing designs and parts so you can
maximize the attention paid to the new ones?

Conclusions

In the U.S., becoming Lean appears to have gone down a path of implementing tools
such as “one piece flow,” “value stream mapping,” “standardized work,” or “kaizen
events,” but results have not always followed. Toyota, by way of contrast, has stayed
focused on its principles and a disciplined emphasis on process improvement to obtain
results such as “making a profit.” “reducing lead time.” “improving productivity,”
“achieving built-in quality,” as well as “respecting human dignity of employees,” etc.
—Art Smalley

If the problem is quality, then figure out where the majority of the defects are occur-
ring and why they are occurring, fix them, and prevent recurrence immediately.

If the problem is low productivity, then analyze jobs for non-value-added
versus value-added time, figure out the points of the greatest amount of waste,
and eliminate it.
If the problem is on-time delivery, then figure out what products are late and
why they are late and fix the root cause.
If there is too much inventory and poor flow in the plant, then by all means, draw
a value stream map and get about fixing the associated points in the process!

Do More with Less

For more than a decade, managers have been urged to do more with less. The
endless downsizing and rightsizing and layoffs have wounded so many employees