Dear Friends of Atzari,
I am still "young" enough to remember when the mere mention of Six Sigma or Lean would alternatively either prompt a response of rolling eyes or some kind of wisecrack. Those who did not understand Six Sigma would roll their eyes and say, "yeah, right, 3.4 defects per millions - THAT will be the day - tell that to MY boss…" And those who did not understand lean would be happy to say - we'll, we're NOT Toyota - OUR industry is different and here's why…"
Those who simply focused only on the BHAG* of Six Sigma failed to understand that it is a set of tools and methodologies to improve the performance of any system.
Those who believed their industry was different (that would be 99.9% of people) would simply say that Lean was someone else's solution to someone else's industry.
Wow - we have come a long way!
Lean and Six Sigma have now become the motherhood and apple pie of most industries. It is now politically safe and correct to utter these as solutions to almost everything.
So … what is the problem, you say, isn't this what you're supposed to think? We'll - that's exactly the problem - no one should be telling us how we're supposed to think!!! These tools are there to help us think, but were never intended as a substitute for thinking.
Both lean and Six Sigma have a very revolutionary and disruptive history about them - they started as alternatives to the accepted status quo. Practitioners of both took pride in challenging the old-school order of things.
Like many good things, today's rebel can become tomorrow's tyrant. And so it is with excellent tools - they can be put to use for progress as well as for detriment.
Most of us know the joke about someone searching a sidewalk for their lost contacts on 3rd street. Someone says, "Where did you lose them?" Well, "I lost them on 2nd street." "Then why are you looking here?" "Well, there's more light here on 3rd street."
Many of us have also heard the anecdote about the consultants that spent several weeks analyzing a metal fabrication operation using their Lean theories and presented their finding to upper management "this step called 'deburring' - just move it to the beginning of the process." Bringing in consultants who have no clue as to what your process is or does is indeed a very cruel joke.
The point is, applying Six Sigma and Lean to the wrong street can easily create what we know as a local optimum. I remember one consulting firm that was applying lean by starting at the raw materials and component stock room. They then proceeded to use masking tape on the conveyor belts to time their efficiency. The consultants were soon shown the way to the door and about a year later the plant closed.
What was missing was a very basic principle: You don't apply a pull system by beginning where it pushes. You don't improve a system by looking at local efficiencies.
Improving an area or "leaning" an area without knowing if it is or is not the system's constraint can in fact have the opposite effect - it can flood the downstream area with products and parts before they are needed! Alternatively, it can create a pull that an upstream bottleneck cannot supply.
Applying Six Sigma to a section of a multi-step process can have similar results. Six Sigma is not all-seeing and all-knowing. It is a tool that can only process the information that it is given. In other words, "garbage in - garbage out." Optimizing a section of a process simply creates a local optimum. By then, many of the true parameters have already been ruled out since the already happened upstream.
Not all Lean and Six Sigma approaches are the same. Without understanding the complete system and its constraints, they can become the very obstacles that they were intended to dissolve.
*Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal (from Good to Great & Built to Last, Jim Collins)
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Thanks and regards,
Jose I. Mora, Principal Consultant
Atzari Consulting, L.L.C.
www.atzari.com
Office: (973) 835-6313 Fax: (866) 223-5813
Mobile: (917) 566-0965
jmora@atzari.com, joseimora@gmail.com
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