t wils @michsigma  Reputation - 5 Rank - Aluminum | Hi All, anyone have some insight on what the next improvement percent should be? We improved performance last year by 52% on a key process. Management wants last year to be the baseline for further improvement. Knowing that the 80/20 rule will be coming into play and that another 50% might be difficult and expensive…what would a realistic, achieveable improvement percent be? Thanks |
MBBinWI @MBBinWI  Reputation - 1829 Rank - Silver | Why do you think that another 50% improvement is going to be difficult or expensive? If this was your first iteration of focused improvement activities, then I would expect that you have another 2 rounds before it gets really difficult to a point where you need to worry about whehter it is worth improving or you need to look at redesign. |
Andrew Banks @BBinNC Reputation - 14 Rank - Aluminum | How is any “goal” founded in data until there are verified root causes and their relative impact on the process is known? MBBinWI, I acquiesce to your experience, but this type of goal setting is SWAG at best, right? |
Gary Cone @garyacone  Reputation - 1157 Rank - Silver | @BBinNC The assertion that “another 50% might be difficult and expensive is the SWAG and probably also an excuse all made without data. The benchmark for Six Sigma is 68% improvement per year sustained over several years. It was done by Motorola 1982 – 1991, AlliedSignal 1995 – 1999, GE 1996 – 2002. Each of these companies were dominant in their market in the last few years of the improvement effort – and then they changed leadership. |
MBBinWI @MBBinWI Reputation - 1829 Rank - Silver | @BBinNC – Of course any estimate of future improvement is going to be a SWAG until data can be gathered to get specifics. Sometimes the improvements are going to be more, sometimes less. It will also not all come from a specific project, and some projects will depend on others in order to become feasible.
Usually those who complain about not being able to achieve further improvement are just too invested in the way things are or have been, or just don’t want to put in the hard work (having found the low hanging fruit). |
Robert Tripp @VenerableBede Reputation - 2294 Rank - Silver | If, after running your first project, you still haven’t learned enough about the process to show, with data, what its entitlement is, you didn’t go far enough on the first project. Shoot for an 80% improvement this time (that will get you to about 90% which is what your 1st project should have been if you still don’t know entitlement) and adjust if you learn that entitlement is something less. That’s the goal you set for yourself; what you commit to management is another story and any conversation about that here is pretty much a waste of time without seeing the process and its data, understanding its scope and quantifying the inherently uncontrollable variability of its inputs. |
Mike Carnell @Mike-Carnell Reputation - 2401 Rank - Silver | A long time ago when this site was just beginning to get a following there was a person who logged on and said “We finished Continuous Improvement a couple years ago. We are looking for the next big thing.” @michsigma you are being asked to do a thing called Continuous Improvement. Not a big deal. It has been going on for years. When you get asked for a 50% improvement I am assuming it is a 50% reduction in defects? Given that you said you have already improved it 52% (reduced defects by 52%) then you are actually being asked for less. It is acknowledging that you got an easy reduction in the beginning so the next part may actually require some effort. As Gary mentioned earlier Motorola, GE and Allied all ran off of a 68% reduction per year. You are getting it easy. Just my opinion. |
MBBinWI @MBBinWI Reputation - 1829 Rank - Silver | @Mike-Carnell – No sense in wasting your wisdom on michsigma – they haven’t logged back in since the original post. |
Mike Carnell @Mike-Carnell Reputation - 2401 Rank - Silver | @MBBinWI just in case – they may just be reading and not wanting to get into the little battles that happen here from time to time. |
February 10, 2012Comments Off
