Mike Walton

A Six Sigma Kaizen Event brings process experts and technical/problem solving leaders together for a period of one to five days to accomplish one or more very specific goals inside the DMAIC framework.

When is a Six Sigma Kaizen Event Useful?

• When the project isn’t moving fast enough through the normal process of weekly team meetings, a focused Kaizen event can often accomplish one  to three months of work in one week.
• When a problem solving team is spread out geographically and cannot seem to move forward with conference calls or video conferences (this is especially true when different countries are involved).
• When teams run into technical roadblocks and simply need time to “hash things out” together in the same location.

What Makes a Successful Event?

• Specific goals.  The entire DMAIC process can rarely be covered in one week, so an achievable set of goals within the DMAIC framework is essential.  An example goal statement might be, “Complete a Gage R&R study on feature XYZ, and run a Multi-Vari study to understand if our variation source is primarily part-to-part, within-part, or time-to-time.”
• A good facilitator.  Team members must believe that the facilitator can keep the team on track and lead them to a successful outcome.
• The right team.  The right team is a blend of process expertise (those who understand the process being studied more than anyone else in the business) and engineering/manufacturing/quality leaders who can come together and get the job done.  Of all these functions, process expertise is the most critical.

The next time you find your project being stalled for one or more reasons, consider a focused Kaizen to power through to the next phase of your project.

A few weeks ago I was in a meeting with a quality engineer from a Fortune 500 company who had run a process capability study on some supplier data.  In this particular case we were dealing with a one-sided specification limit (LSL), and the engineer used an Excel spreadsheet to calculate a Cpk of -3.4, which we all know is an outrageous number.

I asked to see the data and calculation, and the first thing I noticed was that the process average was above the lower specification limit, which told me that there was no way the Cpk could be negative, since in this case the Cpk calculation is Cpk = (Mean – LSL) / (3 sigma).   If the mean was greater than the LSL, how could the Cpk be negative?

The answer was that the engineer was using a PPAP workbook to calculate Cpk, but did not understand the Cpk formula, and the PPAP workbook was not set up to deal with one-sided specification limits.   Fortunately in this case the supplier understood that the quality engineer had made a big mistake, and quickly corrected him.

The result of the quality engineer presenting such an erroneous Cpk calculation resulted in a complete loss of credibility with the supplier, along with the other engineers from his own company who were in the meeting.

I’ve since had more time to work with this quality engineer, and it’s clear to me that he has a dangerous habit that his holding back his career and possibly putting his job in jeopardy – he does not absorb technical details.  It’s not that he isn’t capable.   He has simply benn in the habit of mentally “checking out” during meetings, and apparently in much of his past training.

There are two lessons here, I believe, for all of us –

(1) Know the critical details of your field thoroughly.  For example, any quality engineer should be able to recite the Cpk formula without having to look it up.

(2) Never stop learning – as long as you are stuck in a meeting or training session, you might as well “turn on your brain” and absorb/understand all the details!  It’s much more rewarding that daydreaming.

Any thoughts?

I am grateful to these authors and publishers for their outstanding work, which has helped me in countless situations.  There are links to purchasing locations for these books (click on the images).

1.  World Class Quality by Keki Bhote

For the Analyze and Improve phases of DMAIC.  In my opinion, this is the most powerful, hands-on problem solving book available for manufacturing professionals.  Keki Bhote’s passion for quality and highly opinionated discussions make this book an entertaining and highly educational read.  This is the book that propelled my career at a time when I was a quality engineer in an assembly plant, swamped with quality problems and a very unhappy sales team.  The tools taught in this book enabled me to solve a number of complex problems that others struggled to get their arms around.  The book focuses heavily on the Shainin Methods, which emphasize simple and very effective approaches for isolating root causes on the production floor.  Keki’s mantra is, “Talk the the parts, not the engineers!”  He focuses on fact-based problem solving using physical evidence instead of collective opinion.

2.  Goal-QPC’s Memory Jogger Series

For all phases of DMAIC.  Goal-QPC has a series of quick reference books that are very well written and work very well as training materials.  The book shown is the second edition of th original Memory Jogger, which I have used countless times for training shop-floor associates.  Some of the tools covered include brainstorming, fishbone diagrams, control charts, process flowcharts, histograms, and pareto charts.  A total of 27 tools are covered, and the graphics and examples in the book are outstanding.  Goal-QPC also has a number of other process improvement books, including several quick reference guides on Six Sigma.

3.  Mistake Proofing for Operators

For the Control phase of DMAIC.  I am amazed at the number of businesses that have never introduced their teams to mistake proofing.  This book provides an excellent grasp of the concept, and is loaded with a number of specific examples that show how part and process design come together to produce defect free products.  I have purchased multiple copies of this book for shop floor operators, mechanics, and technicians.  As long as I’ve bought a copy for each person in the class, I have no problem scanning the examples and adding them into my training material.  Mistake proofing is a powerful and lasting defect prevention tool, and is an excellent way to lower risks identified in PFMEA’s.

4.  Strategic Error Proofing:  Successful Processes and Smart FMEA’s

Also for the Control phase of DMAIC.  This is an outstanding book that covers error proofing and mistake proofing (you’ll learn the difference between these two terms when you read the book!), and lays out a framework for designing, implementing, and maintaining devices across large facilities.  The books also provides a framework for rating error proofing and mistake proofing devices (in terms of simplicity, maintainability, and several other factors), something I had not seen until this book was published.  Quality leaders for larger organizations will also appreciate the focus on error proofing and mistake proofing metrics that can be rolled up across plants and businesses.  This is a terrific book.

5.  AIAG’s FMEA Manual

For the Analyze and Control phases of DMAIC.  The Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) publishes a number of excellent how-to guides for quality planning, and this FMEA guide is the most comprehensive that I have seen on the subject.  It includes complete guidelines for facilitating and documenting FMEA’s, and covers every detail of the subject.  The AIAG also publishes a number of other excellent reference publications, including Advanced Quality Planning and Control Plan.  These books are must-have references for quality professionals.

6.  Statistics for Experimenters

Box Hunter & Hunter’s book is a classic DOE training guide that starts with the basics.  If you want to follow sound experimentation techniques (which make all the difference between true conclusions and false conclusions), then read this book.  Here are a few comments from the publisher:  “Catalyzing innovation, problem solving, and discovery, the Second Edition provides experimenters with the scientific and statistical tools needed to maximize the knowledge gained from research data, illustrating how these tools may best be utilized during all stages of the investigative process. The authors’ practical approach starts with a problem that needs to be solved and then examines the appropriate statistical methods of design and analysis.”

I just returned from a plant visit, where I was surprised to find that some important process controls were no longer in place on the production line.  How does this sort of thing happen and how do we prevent it?

Implementing an overarching quality system is essential for sustaining best practices across any organization, and the ISO:9001 framework the most commonly followed model for achieving this goal.  There are several elements inside the ISO:9001 framework, and one of the most critical is QMS (Quality Management System) audits.  When I was a young quality engineer, I viewed QMS audits as outdated practices that added no value.   As my responsibilities have grown over the years to include global, multi-plant responsibility, I have come to appreciate the tremendous value of these audits.

What Does a QMS Audit Accomplish?

QMS audits verify that the quality system is being followed, and without these audits, compliance to the quality system is guaranteed to deteriorate over time.  This is what happened in the plant I visited.  A particular process had been implemented several months prior to my visit that required a great deal of extra effort on the part of the equipment operators.  Unfortunately, there were no audit mechanisms in place to ensure that the equipment operators were carrying out their new responsibilities over the long run, and compliance with the new process gradually deteriorated, particularly on the night shift.  As a result, the plant produced a great deal of suspect product over time, which cost the business hundreds of thousands of dollars in warranty returns.  All of this could have been prevented with a simple routine audit, conducted by the quality team, to ensure that operators across the plant were complying with control plan requirements.

Choose Your Crisis

Businesses have two choices when it comes to the crises they respond to:  they can let their customers pick the crisis-of-the-day when poor quality product is shipped, or they can created their own internal crises by auditing compliance to key processes (business processes too) and implementing solid action plans when audit findings uncover major problems with compliance.  This latter approach provides far lower quality costs for obvious reasons.

The Keys to Successful QMS Audits

1. Have the discipline to create and follow an internal audit calendar – this is the Quality team’s responsibility.
2. Make the audits specific and meaningful.  Target the critical areas in the business and focus on specific process requirements.  General audits, where the auditor randomly selects where to focus, provide very little value.
3. This is very important – the management team must react strongly to internal audit results, as if a customer had reported a major quality issue.  This type of behavior will ensure that the entire team understands the importance of adhering to the quality system, and that systemic causes behind noncompliance are corrected.