Page 63 - Lean six sigma demystified

42 Lean Six Sigma DemystifieD

Here’s Toyota’s critical discovery: When you make lead times short and
focus on keeping production lines flexible, you actually get better quality,
responsiveness, productivity, and utilization of equipment and space. Some
core beliefs include

• The right process will produce the right results.
• Developing your people and partners adds value.
• Continuously solving root problems drives organizational learning.
• One-piece flow increases productivity, profitability, and quality.
• Products don’t like to wait in line. Material, parts, and products are impatient.

• The only thing that adds value is the physical or informational transforma-
tion of raw material into something the customer wants.

• Errors are opportunities for learning.
• Problem solving is 20% tools and 80% thinking.
The hardest part of learning to think Lean is abandoning old ideas about
economies of scale and mass production. These are basically push systems
based on projected customer demand. Quality is inspected into the product.
These batch-and-queue ideas must be the first casualties of the Lean
transformation.
In Lean, quality, productivity, and low cost come from producing small
batches of a given product, start to finish without any piles of partially finished
goods, also known as work in process (WIP).

? still struggling

In a manufacturing plant, look between the machines to see where interim
products stack up. In a restaurant, look at where orders and food stack up wait-
ing for processing or delivery. In a hotel, look at where guests stack up. Airlines,
for example, have switched to online check-in to reduce lines at the airport. How
can you eliminate stacking of products or customers?