Page 84 - Lean six sigma demystified

Chapter 2 Lean Demy S tifie D 63

3. If the answer to any of these questions is yes, the step may be non-value-
added. If so, can we remove it from the process? Much of the idle, non-
value-adding time in a process lies in the arrows: Orders sit in in-boxes
or computers waiting to be processed; calls wait in queue for a represen-
tative to answer. How can we eliminate delay? Can we do multiple steps
in parallel?

4. How can activities and delays be eliminated, simplified, combined, or
reorganized to provide a faster, higher-quality flow through the process?
Investigate handoff points: How can you eliminate delays and prevent
lost, changed, or misinterpreted information or work products at these
points? If there are simple, elegant, or obvious ways to improve the
process now, revise the flowchart to reflect those changes.

Stop the Line

To better serve customers, employees often work around problems when they
occur. Work-arounds may be expedient, but they are inefficient. They are a
form of rework: The system isn’t working properly, so people learn to cope with
it. And coping takes longer and costs more than fixing the system.
One of the principles of Lean thinking is to stop the line when there’s a
problem. At Toyota, any employee can stop the line when a problem is detected
so that you don’t continue to make bad products or deliver bad service. Then
everyone rushes in to solve the problem before restarting the line.
When you fail to stop the line, the pressure to serve the customer is like the
flow of water, it finds another path. If you don’t come back to the problem
soon, the work-around becomes the new non-value-added channel for handling
customer needs.
This is another S in Lean thinking: Stop! What if every person on the line
had the right to stop production when an error was detected? Stopping produc-
tion is far cheaper than producing defective parts that simply have to be fixed
later. When the line stops, there are visual signals that show exactly where the
process stopped so that problem solving can begin immediately.
What have you been working around? Isn’t it time to stop the madness?
What processes do you need to simplify and streamline? What information
system changes do you need to make to redirect the flow of work into a
smoother channel?
Most problems do not call for complex statistical analysis. Instead, they need
detailed problem solving.