Page 136 - Six Sigma Demystified
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Chapter 6 a n a ly z e S tag e 117
4. Unnecessary movement of personnel or materials.
5. Waiting by employees as unfinished work in an upstream process is com-
pleted.
6. Design of product or processes that do not meet the customer’s needs.
Reducing Process Complexities
One common method for decreasing cycle times is to reduce the process or
product complexities. The process is simplified by reducing the number of
“special items” that are processed. By simplifying to one product or one type of
service customer, then efforts can be concentrated on achieving higher efficien-
cies. It should be obvious that the more options offered, the higher is the pro-
cess complexity, and the longer is the cycle time. By standardizing, cycle time
can be reduced.
Henry Ford, in offering the first affordable automobile, realized the effi-
ciency advantages provided by standardization. His motto, “Any color you want,
so long as it’s black,” exemplified the notion of standardization. While the mod-
ern approach to standardization at times may limit options, it tends to empha-
size the advantages of simplified processes. It seeks to remove activities or
product designs that provide little extra value at the cost of increased cycle
times, processing complexity, or inventory levels. For example, the costs of
approvals and upset customers may be enough to offset the cost of standard-
izing on second- day shipments for all orders instead of only those orders with
approval. Likewise, the additional design, processing, and inventory costs of
offering a wide assortment of similar products with slightly different feature
sets on each product may not be justified if (for less total cost) the enhanced
features could be offered on all products. I was shopping recently for a laptop
computer, and one of the vendors had close to 10 product lines of laptops, each
of which had 10 to 20 models. If the manufacturers are building the computers
to order and have designed their processes properly using this concept of stan-
dardization, then they may well be competitive in offering such a varied prod-
uct line. On the other hand, if they are building for inventory, I suspect that
they could simplify the product line and save enough in design, processing, and
inventory costs such that their least expensive models could include many of
the features found only on their higher- priced models. By grouping parts or
services into families, common methods can be applied, thus simplifying pro-
cesses and reducing overall cycle times and design, processing, and inventory
costs.