One of the things I enjoy most is visiting other companies and seeing how they do things. This is typically arranged either by a friendly supplier or through a scheme such as Advantage West Midlands and the Manufacturing Advisory Service.

Visiting other sites has huge benefits over and above any other kind of medium including seminars, on-site demos, and evaluation units. It allows you to see and experience technologies and ideas in practical everyday use as well as gaining insights into approaches that you might never otherwise have considered.

Six Sigma is something I have seen in use in a number of site visits now and I find it a fascinating approach that when tied with other methodologies such as 5S offers a sustainable understandable approach to continuous improvement. Many people balk at the idea of things like CI (continuous improvement) and TQM (Total Quality Management) but in my experience its always been the way these things have been put across that creates the barrier. Let’s face it anything that improves what we do and how we do it has to be a good thing doesn’t it?

Essentially Six Sigma is concerned with ongoing process improvements. It’s purpose is to identify important quality and process problems and minimise or eliminate them using a disciplined and thorough approach. It uses a structured set of separate steps called DMAIC - Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, and Control. Perhaps its the software developer in me that is used to structured design methodologies that sees the appeal of this way of working but at the same time I appreciate that many people are afraid of change which means these methodologies need to be implemented in a way in which staff feel motivated and therefore embrace the challenge.

More often than not I have seen companies try and introduce these things without a thorough understanding of what they are or how to go about it and rather than investing time and money in understanding the process better and taking baby steps, they instead start a full-on big bang approach by pulling management teams en-masse out into team building days followed by series of wasted quality circles or improvement committees which never really get anywhere because no one is really sure what they are supposed to be doing.

I would suggest that these companies start out slow and ‘pick the low hanging fruit’, i.e., we can all identify small things that given a little time and investment (not just financial investment but other things such as commitment, team working, understanding are just as important) can be improved. Why not approach it initially in a fun way, ‘under the radar’, or as a charitable money raising event. For example:

• Have a clear goal in mind, e.g. reducing wasted paper costs
• Collect information on how what the costs are and how much paper is being wasted
• Ask staff to look at one area of their work where they feel paper is being wasted and come up with ideas to improve it. Say, for example the best idea wins a prize or gets to elect a charity.
• Take a few ideas and implement them, calculating the savings. Perhaps agree to pay a percentage of the savings to a chosen charity.
• Get the team to come up with ways of ensuring that the problem doesn’t re-occur (otherwise what’s the point of fixing it!) and implement them making sure there are regular reviews in place.

There are the five steps, defined in the DMAIC method of:

• Define a problem - clearly
• Measure the scale of the problem - facts and figures
• Analyse the situation - come up with ideas
• Improve the situation - implement solutions
• Control the situation going forward

Building on from this inter-departmental tasks can be approached - for instance how many times do you see essentially the same information being produced by different departments and thought that time could be saved and the process streamlined by getting various people together and rethinking the task?

Wiki has more information on Six Sigma here, and more information on 5S here.