Why aren’t my CI Efforts working? (#27)

A few months ago, a friend called me to let me know he had been promoted to plant manager. He knew that I was working on a Lean Six Sigma Deployment in his hometown so we sat down to dinner to catch up and discuss his new position. I learned that he was responsible for reconstructing his plant to be viewed as a reference point for every other production facility under said organization to imitate.

Because of my expertise in Continuous Improvement projects, he asked for my help. I asked him to explain what kind of projects they were doing in their production facility. He described the process of their targeted projects, exclaiming that each completed project seemed successful. However, they did not produce an increased throughput. They corrected several machines and processes, but their projection time did not decrease.

Happy with a potential solution, I began to tell him about TLS. TLS is the unification of Lean, Six Sigma, and Theory of Constraints. Often, organizations will use Lean or Six Sigma projects to improve their processes, but they do not completely understand where they should focus those efforts. This will end like my friend’s CI projects; they improved parts of the system but did not improve the speed of the whole system. We talked for several hours about the potential capability of TLS.

My friend’s organization, like so many others, used a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) which only displayed their daily aggregated efforts. Their “Yield” reflected what they put into their process and what their process put out. This kind of metric doesn’t offer a methodological view of why your process didn’t perform as you expected. So many of the steps between the “X’s” and “Y’s” are unseen and because of this, the organization will alter their process when the outputs did not meet their expectations. However, they typically adjust based on guesses instead of quantifiable data. Without the use of data, these SWAG (Scientific Wild A** Guess) adjustments will negatively impact their daily “Yield.”

To integrate TLS into my friend’s organization, or any organization, we needed to view our processes systematically and needed a clear way to determine where the bottlenecks were in the system. First, we need t use the Lean methodology by using Overall Equipment Effectiveness as a primary metric. We instilled OEE’s to the plant, as well as per each production line and per each product. This metric lets us see how our production lines were operating in respect to Performance (Ratio of daily production to effective capacity), Quality (number of good vs bad products), and Availability (ratio of used production time to available production time).

We should also collect data for every critical step in the process line to determine where the constraint is. At my friend’s plant, we defined six critical steps (all the production lines were almost exact replicates of one another) and then defined a metric and throughput (along with a common denominator) for each critical step in each line. Once these definitions were created, we collected data for each throughput for a 2-month period.

This collection of data showed us exactly where the bottle neck was in the production line. The bottle neck/ constraint is the slowest process or step in the system. Most organizations do not completely understand these constraints and focus their Lean/Six Sigma Continuous Improvement Efforts elsewhere. When you design your project to increase speed, but target your efforts on anything other than the bottleneck, your project will be unsuccessful, and your speed will not increase. I’m sure you’re familiar with the phrase “You are only as strong as your weakest link,” and the same theory applies to the bottle neck. You can never go faster than the constraint.

What we found was interesting. We found that in some of the production lines, the bottle neck was equivalent to the demand which resulted in good performance. We also discovered two production lines with a solid bottle neck (the constraint didn’t move) with a production output that only reached roughly 70% of their demand. Each of these stalled lines were previously involved in Lean and Six Sigma projects, but none of these projects concentrated on the constraint. The results included in a severe bottle neck in both production lines where inventory accrued.

When we inferred the problem in the process, we could then fix the TAKT time for these production lines to match the constraint. We concentrated several projects to each bottle neck and at the end of three weeks, the plant had reached record levels of throughput. By solving the bottle necks, they witnessed the real results of all of their Lean and Six Sigma implementations.

Have you been involved with Continuous Improvement projects that did not focus on the constraint?

About Six Sigma Development Solutions, Inc.

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We Provide Onsite Lean Six Sigma Certification Training. Some of the training's we provide are: Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt, Lean Six Sigma Champions Training and Lean Certifications for Healthcare, Finance, I.T, Manufacturing, Processing, Logistics, Retail Sales and Government.

SSDSI will come to your site to train for your choice of the Lean Six Sigma Certification Levels. Onsite training is more cost effective than open enrollment training when training larger groups of team members.

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