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Rollout of Lean Six Sigma

Launching Lean Six Sigma in a company involves a lot of different activities. Someone has to develop the needed training. Management needs to select the people to go through the training and the projects those people should work on. The timing and sequence of these activities varies from company to company. A typical process is shown in Figure 7.2 ( next page). What’s important in this picture is that…

A lot happens within the first 100 days or so (because slow results aren’t any better than no results in many cases!)
Lean Six Sigma usually begins at the top levels of a company, with executive training and planning. (This is labeled as “initiation” in the chart.) It’s important that executives get their training before others so that they can confidently lead Lean Six Sigma.
There will usually be a formal announcement to the company either before or after executive training.
Both project selection and training typically occurs in “waves.” One group of people is chosen for training, then they begin work on the initial projects. Then another group is trained and starts project work, and so on.

Figure 7.2: Typical timeline for Lean Six Sigma rollout

The timing of the waves varies a lot. Caterpillar, for instance, decided that it needed to have all its staff up to speed on Lean and Six Sigma methods very quickly. They trained 750 Black Belts in six months. Bank One, on the other hand, went through a year-long demonstration period of what it called “Focus 2.0” (their version of Lean Six Sigma). During this period, internal experts coached a limited number of teams on major projects. (There was no formal training except for on-the-spot coaching given by the experts.) The success of these projects created a lot of internal awareness of just what Lean and Six Sigma could do for the business, to the point where business units are now asking for training.

Conclusion

To have any chance of success, implementation of Lean Six Sigma must be accompanied by new positions , new training, and new ways for different layers of the organization to communicate. This new “infrastructure” helps companies translate their investment in Lean Six Sigma into measurable results to the organization and its customers.

Chapter 8: MakingImprovements That Last: An Illustrated Guide to DMAIC and the Lean Six Sigma Toolkit

Overview

Every organization has problems that get “ solved ” over and over again, only to reappear. Teams work hard for months, generating solutions that people just know will work… but don’t. This is another type of failure that Lean Six Sigma can’t afford. That’s why it uses a modern problem-solving method designed to avoid such problems. The model is called DMAIC (pronounced duh- MAY-ick), which stands for Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve- Control.

DMAIC has proven itself to be one of the most effective problem-solving methods ever used because it forces teams to use data to…

Confirm the nature and extent of the problem
Identify true causes of problems
Find solutions that evidence shows are linked to the causes
Establish procedures for maintaining the solutions even after the project is done

If you go through Lean Six Sigma training, you’ll learn a lot about DMAIC and its data-based methods that are called “problem-solving tools.” In this chapter of the book, we just want to introduce you to the logic of DMAIC and spotlight a few tools it uses to prevent the kinds of problems many teams used to run into. The next chapter will describe case studies where DMAIC was used to solve real problems.

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George M., Rowlands D., Kastle B.

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