Page 76 - Lean six sigma demystified

Chapter 2 Lean Demy S tifie D 55

If you want to know how far people travel, have them wear a pedometer for
a few days. In hospital labs, we found technicians were walking 2 to 5 miles a
day in a 2400-sq-ft space—the distance from Denver to Pittsburgh—every year.
When we redesigned the space, they traveled less than half that distance and I
think there was still room for improvement.

INsIGHt Never use a fixed workbench, desk, or other work area. Everything
should be mobile so that you can reconfigure on a moment’s notice any time you
discover a better way to handle the product or service.

Have you let the work in your office or factory expand to fill the available
space? Couldn’t you tighten it up to reduce unnecessary travel of people and
products? How might this reduce your turnaround times and minimize errors?
It’s not unusual to reduce your space requirements by 20% and double pro-
ductivity. Don’t let work expand to fill the available space. Shrink the space to
match the work and optimize throughput. Your customers will love you for it.
Lean Tools

Having said all that, there are two key tools used to help visualize problems
with speed: value stream mapping and spaghetti diagrams.

• Value stream mapping (Fig. 2-5). To visualize the flow of the process (http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mcMwlgUFjU). Go to our website: http://
www.qimacros.com/demystified.html and fill in your email address to down-
load the QI Macros which contain a template for value stream mapping.
• Spaghetti diagrams (Fig. 2-6). To visualize the flow of work through the
production area (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmLrDjT5g8o).

With these two tools you can identify most of the problems associated with
delays and non-value-added waste.
A simple way to begin is to map the value stream and analyze each element
for non-value-added waste. Then redesign the flow to remove as much of the
non-value-added waste as possible and standardize the ongoing process.
Value stream mapping assumes that an idle resource or product is a wasted
resource. An activity or step that doesn’t in some way directly benefit a cus-
tomer is also wasteful. Some examples include

• Rework—fixing stuff that’s broken—is one of the more insidious forms of
non-value-added work: The customer wants you to fix it, but she or he
really didn’t want it to break in the first place.