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

  Process variation analysis is essential in order to improve it. There is always variation. Sometimes we only have random variation such as in the case of dice throwing: https://polyhedrika.blogspot.com/2020/12/dice-throwing-exercise.html   Normally we have additional variation caused by special causes and these are the ones we should analyse and reduce first. Hourly Production  We are going to analyse the hourly production data collected during one month: Download this Excel file Trend Analysis.xlsx from OneDrive folder Process stability SPC charts allow us to check for stability: see if all variation is random. https://polyhedrika.blogspot.com/2020/12/spc-analysis.html We now apply an individuals SPC chart to our production data to check this: The green and red dots are a clear indication of lack of stability: there are special causes affecting production. Timestamp Data Collection When we collect process data either manually or automatically it is essential to collect the timestam

  Project management is the practice of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time (Wikipedia) A key application for project management is job scheduling in order to define the sequence of jobs for each product or customer project. When we schedule production we typically work in batches (in spite of Lean) and a scheduler is provided in    Production Scheduling In this case we are going to approach non repetitive projects such a house remodeling. You can download here an excel file you can use by removing all data in light yellow cells and filling in your own: Download this Excel file Scheduling.xlsx from OneDrive  Some Project Management Problems The schedule was distributed in paper but I am not sure I have the latest version I have received several emails and Whats Apps with changes but it is not clear which is the final result The plumber found existing plumbing in