Operational Excellence Tools Blog : lean six sigma

Podcast of last weekend's radio show on using six sigma to improve energy efficiency

LeanTeam — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:31:00 GMT

Podcast of six sigma segment from Corning on last weekend's America's Business with Mike Hambrick show. Again highlights the use of Visio as a tool in implementing process improvements.

Podcast is here.

How Corning used Six Sigma to improve energy efficiency - this weekend's topic on America's Business with Mike Hambrick

LeanTeam — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 01:22:00 GMT

This weekend another radio segment airs on America's Business with Mike Hambrick on how Corning used Six Sigma (DMAIC), supported by Microsoft technology tools such as Visio and our partner Itron, to achieve the following objectives:

§ Assure uninterrupted supply of energy to BSD facilities.

§ Reduce the total direct cost of energy as impacted by consumption and price

§ Reduce consumption through the use of energy management tools and processes.

§ Develop a rigorous sustainable process to manage energy effectively

Here are the details:

Segment Title: Incorporating Six Sigma Methodologies to Develop and Sustain the Business Services Division Energy Management Process

Dates: March 10 – 11, 2007

Interviewees:

1. Jon Arnold – Microsoft - Global Utilities Industry Director | Microsoft Corporation

2. Philip Mezey – ITRON - Senior Vice President of Software Solutions

3. Scott Ryan - Corning – Global Energy Manager

A podcast will be posted here on Monday.

Interesting article on Lockheed Martin's LM21 management philosophy combining lean and six sigma

LeanTeam — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:07:00 GMT

...from Defense Acquisition Review at www.dau.mil/pubs/arq/2004arq/Joyce.pdf

A couple of years old but still a good read.

New case study - Gates Corporation enabling continuous improvement with Sharepoint

LeanTeam — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 05:54:00 GMT

New case study published on Gates Corporation - details how they are using various Microsoft technologies such as Sharepoint to standardize work, improve information access, and push KPIs and transparency throughout the organization.

Excerpt: "To enforce consistent business processes, executive management and division leaders create annual objectives that correlate to pillars of the Gates Business Leadership Process, a permanent model for continuous improvement at Gates. These objectives are easily accessible through the portal. What’s more, managers can log on to their KPI list in the Unity portal and see red, yellow, or green lights indicating the status of each objective. Team members scope out their work (mapped to their division leader’s annual objectives) in 90-day action plans and can readily see how close they are to meeting the action plans."

Case study is published at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=200899

5s for the Information Worker: Example of how to use OneNote and Sharepoint to simplify and expedite team follow-up

LeanTeam — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 20:23:00 GMT

As an industry marketing manager at Microsoft, I face a challenge that I’m sure many teams share – how do I make it easy for a solution specialist team to follow-up with customers who have registered interest? This is important for 3 reasons:

1. This is a common breakdown point in the value stream that crosses sales and marketing.

2. Customers who want follow-up, want it quickly.

3. This is one of the biggest leverage points in both maximizing the yield out of the lead management process, and in maximizing the process capacity of the specialist team, which is limited.

It is also an item of personal interest to me as it is a problem I struggled with in a DMADV six sigma project in GE in a “previous life” focused on increasing both the yield and targeting of customer acquisition processes. Had I possessed the tools then that are available now, it would have not only been easier to manage my green belt virtual teams, but to use relatively simple, inexpensive technology solutions to take quick, incremental steps to get 80% of the way there.

Some may say “that’s what a CRM system does,” but I disagree in today’s modern workplace. A CRM system forces the team member to enter an unfamiliar and often cryptically complicated application environment to both find and update information. In the case of a system like Salesforce.com, you must be online to utilize it. Given that I am typing this post from seat 39C on a delayed flight back to Newark, this has its limitations. In the case of Siebel, you can put lipstick on the interface, but the system is not fundamentally set up to allow quick collaboration or just-in-time information discovery. I believe that using true collaborative tools in conjunction with CRM systems can significantly improve their usefulness.

If this had been a year ago, I would have advocated Groove as “the solution” – structured collaboration, offline access, and back-end integration to Sharepoint. These things are still true in Groove 2007, but again you have to take the time to install and learn about Groove. For people who love it, myself included, I still prefer this method, but in the spirit of 5s I need to get as close as possible to the ideal of making information appear right where the specialist would naturally look on a daily basis. Where is this? Their Outlook inbox, of course, especially since traveling expert resources spend a lot of time on the plane catching up on e-mail in offline mode and prepping for the next customer meeting.

At its heart an RSS feed or Wiki would do the trick, but there are a couple of catches:

1. Our manufacturing specialists may throw terms like PLC, kaizen, and SCOR around freely, but ask them to use a Wiki and they’ll probably burst out laughing.

2. There is a real need to quickly throw together mixed-content in a rich format – unrealistic to reduce everything to HTML:

a. E-mail threads about previous customer interactions.

b. Clippings from research services, online sites, analysts, and publications about the company or individual being contacted.

c. Photos, PDFs, or presentation graphics that relate to a major initiative the individual is driving.

d. Internal structured information from spreadsheets and CRM systems.

The solution! The best tool I’ve found is a shared OneNote 2007 workbook that is published on a Sharepoint site and published to Outlook as a Sharepoint List. It has the following advantages:

1. Anyone can update it and it is stored securely on the intranet.

2. Information flows automatically to subscribers’ Outlook for offline access prior to a customer meeting.

3. Meeting notes, etc. entered in offline mode automatically synchronize back to the Sharepoint workbook.

4. Cutting and pasting are super quick and easy in almost any format (HTML, e-mail, Office applications, PDF, even Ink for Tablet PC users). Images and text co-exist easily with minimal formatting.

This is a great example of how a relatively simple collborative tool can dramatically improve my ability to get information to the specialist who needs it, just in time, just in the place they need it.

Look for a future post showing how to set this up with screenshots, etc.

- Marc from the Lean Team

Great read - Scoble's book on the impact of blogging on how corporations communicate with their customers

LeanTeam — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 20:12:00 GMT

I just started reading a great book on how blogging is changing both “the online conversation” and the way corporations relate to their customers via marketing, PR, and media channels. There's a lot in here on how Microsoft's decision to allow employee blogs early has helped to improve the company's image with key audiences, and to establish a 2-way conversation directly with key customer bases to solicit feedback on new product development.

Interesting in that one of the hardest things in applying lean and six sigma principles to deliver "the perfect product launch" is in making sure you have clearly identified the value axes that influence customer buying decisions.

Also has insightful commentary on what I might call "lean thinking" by some marketing and PR luminaries about how word-of-mouth can be a much cheaper, faster, and more effective launch tactic than traditional PR/media, and how blogging technlogy can enable this.

Highly readable, and contains some interesting commentary on the evolution of employee blogging at Microsoft and Sun.

Naked Conversations, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.

Scoble is known as the quintessential Microsoft blogger and his blog http://www.scobleizer.com is one of the top 5 business blogs on the net.

- Marc from the Lean Team

Lean solutions director Ingo Heel and Just Born Foods profiled on NAM America's Business Radio show this weekend !

LeanTeam — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 23:34:00 GMT

Tune in to the National Association of Manufacturers weekly radio show America's Business with Mike Hambrick this weekend on Feb 10-11 for a segment on Lean Manufacturing. Interviews include Ingo Heel, Lean Solutions Director for Microsoft, and a profile of Just Born Foods' success story presented by USC Consulting Group.

For a list of stations and broadcast times, go to http://www.nam.org/s_nam/doc1.asp?CID=202321&DID=237382

Stay tuned for podacsts after the segment airs!

- Marc from the Lean Team

New Manufacturing Business Technology article on lean replenishment

LeanTeam — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:55:00 GMT

...shows that the application of lean thinking and tools to the supply chain is a hot area in the industry. Ultriva, quoted in the article, is a provider of electronic kanban and other solutions built on the Microsoft platform using tools such as SharePoint and SQL Server.

Check out the article at http://www.mbtmag.com/current_issues/2007/feb/busperf2.asp

- Marc from the Lean Team

5s for the Information Worker

LeanTeam — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 20:33:00 GMT

Over the recent holidays, I embarked on a backup, cleanup, and Office 2007 upgrade for my PC. As part of the process, I realized that it would be a good idea to take a look at the 5s concept from an information worker perpsective, since e-mail and spreadsheets are the "tools" and "dies" used by many in the corporate world today, including many lean practitioners.

Classic definition of 5s, quoted from the iSixSigma glossary at http://www.isixsigma.com/dictionary/5S-486.htm

Seiri - Put things in order (remove what is not needed and keep what is needed)
Seiton - Proper Arrangement (Place things in such a way that they can be easily reached whenever they are needed)
Seiso - Clean (Keep things clean and polished; no trash or dirt in the workplace)
Seiketsu - Purity (Maintain cleanliness after cleaning - perpetual cleaning)
Shitsuke - Commitment (Actually this is not a part of '4S', but a typical teaching and attitude towards any undertaking to inspire pride and adherence to standards established for the four components)

I evaluated the relevance of these concepts for an information worker, and rated my own performance in some of these areas:

1. My laptop, combined with my smartphone and my corporate Exchange server, is essentially my "workspace." I have over 4 gigbytes of e-mail and documents just from the current fiscal year at Microsoft - is my workspace clean and "in order"? Can I find what I need even with a powerful tool such as Windows Desktop Search? How could I use the capabilities of Windows Vista to help find, use, and share information?

2. I am highly mobile and work both with internal Microsoft staff as well as with a variety of external partners and suppliers. Have I chosen the right way to organize, communicate, and publish key data so that the right data is accessible at the right time, online or offline, to the constituents who need it? Are the tools I need at my fingertips? Was I truly using the full capabilities of Outlook, Sharepoint, Groove, and Windows Mobile to make my life easier? I think this point has a lot of commonality with many lean leaders who manage or mentor a virtual team, and face the challenge of reporting data both at the shop floor or even PLC level and doing rollups for executive managment.

3. Have I set up standard processes to automate analysis and reporting, and establish workflows for my virtual team as much as possible?

4. Have I secured my data in such a way as to enable access for the right people while minimizing risk? In many ways this is part of the "sustain" tenet of 5s, and some companies have explicitly added safety and security as a "5s plus" concept.

In an ongoing series, I'll be jotting notes on ways I have found to create simple solutions to some of these challenges using the tools I already have on my desktop. I hope this will helpful for lean or six sigma professionals who face similar challenges.

- Marc from the Lean Team

Join me at the Lean Transformation Summit

LeanTeam — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 22:25:00 GMT

Join me in attending this conference...several of the companies speaking are using software and tools built on the Microsoft platform to enable their lean initiatives. As a former black belt for a service business at GE, I am particularly interested in hearing a current perspective on the success of their blended lean and six sigma thinking.

- Marc from the Lean Team

Lean Transformation Summit 2007
February 28 - March 1, Atlanta

This conference is designed to help you learn from leaders and implementers who are pioneering new applications in lean thinking and moving beyond isolated islands to create lean enterprises. In plenary sessions, you'll hear company executives describe the essential business cases for launching a lean transformation, whether to improve profits and profitability or to create customer intimacy. They will also discuss why they use lean as a strategy and the experience of transforming the entire business. In subsequent breakout sessions, implementers from each company will follow up on the plenary discussion by providing detailed descriptions of how to's, what obstacles were overcome, and what results were achieved.

Click here for to learn more, download the brochure, and register.

How Software Can Help Your Lean Program – and You, the Lean Professional

LeanTeam — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 20:05:00 GMT

There is nothing like walking into the “war room” after a kaizen event. I usually see the same thing - butcher paper and sticky notes lining the walls from floor to ceiling. It is the result of people coming together to improve their value streams – the scene is impressive. What I’m less impressed with is what teams do after this event...

I see well-educated, highly trained professionals sitting about six inches from the wall with their laptops hammering in all of the financial and operational data they recorded into Excel and mapping out the value stream in Visio. Sometimes they use a common format, sometimes they don’t. Then they take all of this data, do some “standard” analysis work, and create a management outbrief in Powerpoint. When I ask how long that effort takes, I get answers anywhere from a few days to a few weeks depending on the size and complexity of the value stream, and how many resources are assigned.

To me, this is waste. The work is repetitive, it should be standardized, and people who get paid to solve problems and implement improvements should spend as little time as possible on it.

This is where software comes in…

Software can help streamline the time it takes to enter the data, and automate the repetitive analysis and reporting aspects of this process. You may have already tried to solve this by building something internally, or you may have poked around to see what is out there.

I am fortunate to work closely with a partner that builds a solution for lean professionals. The Orlando Software Group provides a product build on top of the Microsoft Office platform called LeanView.

If you can relate to the above scenario…take 5 minutes and check out their online flash demo: http://www.osgi.com/leanview/lvdemo/index2.php?rid=4.

I’d love your feedback…

-Brian Willson

Microsoft Lean Team