Page 40 - Lean six sigma demystified

Chapter 1 What iS Lean Six Sigm a ? 19

in all aspects of hospital care making it the eighth leading cause of death
in the United States. An article in 2009 indicated that this hasn’t improved.
Your business may not involve life-or-death services or products, so your
mistake rate is unlikely to be any better. Even if you are 99% good, fixing
the 1% bad can cost a fortune.

2. Operations. Operations include every aspect other than the core busi-
ness: marketing, sales, orders, purchasing, billing, payments, and so on.
I’ve seen data that shows a 3% error rate on patient armbands, 17%
order errors, and $100 million dollars in rejected insurance claims. These
are all operational problems.
Most businesses spend too much time working on their strengths (making
the core business process more effective and efficient) and too little time work-
ing on their weaknesses (marketing, sales, invoicing, billing, shipping, purchas-
ing, and payments). Although the customer-affecting improvements to the core
business are important, the profit-affecting ones on the operations side are criti-
cal to reducing costs and boosting profit. To make breakthrough improvements
in speed and quality possible, you have to take some time out of your busy
schedule and shift your focus.

Secret 1: Work on Your Department or Business, Not in It

I recently went into Sears to order a dishwasher and a TV. I got the part num-
bers and went to one of the checkouts in Appliances. They said that they could
order the dishwasher, but not the TV. I’d have to go to the TV department to
order the TV. The TV department wanted to charge me double to have it
delivered on the same day as the dishwasher. Doesn’t this sound stupid to you?

Shouldn’t I have been able to order and pay for them both at the same time?
Have you ever walked into someone else’s business and almost immediately
noticed some way that they could improve their operation to be better, faster,
or cheaper? Why haven’t they noticed what you find obvious?
The answer isn’t obvious: they’re busy working in their business, but they
rarely ever step out and work on their business.
We all get trapped mentally inside of our companies and our orientations
because we spend so much time working in them. It takes some mental gym-
nastics to learn how to step outside of the business, to get some distance from
it, so that you can work on the business and its processes. If you want a reli-
able, dependable business that produces predictable, consistent results, you
will need proven methods and tools to make it happen.