Polyhedrika

  When it comes to process improvement Lean and Six Sigma are both useful and complement each other. Lean focuses on the elimination of waste (non-value-add) Six Sigma tries to get to the root cause of waste to avoid problems from reoccurring   A common source of waste is variation   Six Sigma focuses on reducing variation What comes first?  Philosophy or Tools? Lean and Six Sigma philosophies are essential to justify and understand the tools required to implement them. But these philosophies are difficult to understand without a deep understanding of the tools.  Manage the Improvement Project  A project charter is useful to define the project, participants, objectives, etc. Project scheduling keeps track of who does what and when An Obeya Room is often used to focus all project improvement actions and keep everyone up to date. Understand the Current Process  Before we start improving we need a deep understanding of the current process so we can Go to Gemba and build a Value Str

Optimize both Yield and Cost with Minitab Design of Experiments Design of Experiments is a powerful technique to optimize process outputs in complex processes where multiple factors affect the outputs. When we want to optimize more than one output the problem becomes more complex. With this example we want to follow the steps, using Minitab, to optimize both process yield and cost by acting on 3 critical factors which have been identified by previous experiments. Process Improvement Steps DEFINE: The first step in process improvement is to map the current process as it is really happening with a  Value Stream Map . MEASURE: Then we need to  collect process data  in the line. MEASURE VARIATION: To understand the process dynamic behavior we will need statistically significant data to enable  simulation     CONTROL: The first data analysis is to check for stability with  Statistical Process Control MEASURE CAPABILITY: Once we insure the process is stable we want to know to what extent i