Rhineg

Ted,Welcome to the Rock vs. Hard Place of process improvement for cost avoidance.If your sponsors and stakeholders will only see a negative from savings leading to budget reductions, then you must justify process improvement on capability expansion. Help them to show their ability to deliver more from a flat budget. Then you can focus on…[Read more]

Hello m4cot,Anytime you have a “too much documentation” project, it is beneficial to understand the original purpose of the documents from your stakeholders perspective… “ask Why 5 times” is a good tool.Most documentation has been created to assure control and oversight. Stakeholders will only be comfortable with alternatives that assure the…[Read more]

Hello Mark,There is an underlying issue which seems hidden in your question. Did your organization create belts to transform and control business processes or as a badge of honor?If the belts exist to transform and control business processes, then those belts should be finding opportunities within their “business specific activities”. If those…[Read more]

Some things you might explore:DoE for tablet production: looking at hardness and dissolution time vs. choice of excipient, press speed, pressure settings, moisture content in ingredients or room humidity, etc.Calibration protocols vs. SPC – is there tampering… recalibrating an instrument that is not out-of-control?

Lorax,Thank you for sharing. You have certainly stirred up interest.I would also appreciate a copy of your simulation at [email protected],

I suggest you go back to your 5 Why’s for one more “Why”. Why are the nurses dissatisfied with supply availability? I suspect you will see issues such as interruption of patient care, extra travel to obtain supplies upon stock-out, etc. These will then provide good hints at the appropriate measures which should lead to correct inventories to…[Read more]

Be very careful on establishing your targets. You don’t need 800 hammers to build 5 or 6 garden sheds (or even 5 to 6 per month).Pervasive training of YB’s to get overall organization awareness is good. Champion training for all division directors is also great. HOWEVER, target the number of GBs and BBs at the level of concurrent change your…[Read more]

You not only need to complete the Implementation phase DMAI, but you need to establish and prove that you have accomplished Control so your benefits do not evaporate DMAIC.

As a Lean BB and Head of PMO I would initially recommend 6-sigma first to clean up the business process before scoping an IT project to handle all of the diversity of a messy process. That leads to cleaner Business Requirements and less scope creep and technical risks.However since you are an IT shop to a client, you may not get to drive waste…[Read more]

Hi Tinga,I suggest that you change your perspective from internal to external. Your customer does not care about your internal process difficulties, they only want product which is reliably within USL and LSL and they might even benefit from using less of that full range. Your low Cpk is a legitimate indication of how much of your customer’s…[Read more]

If there is “not much scope for improvement”, then why does your organization need a BB? Rethink your question in terms of where are the primary pain points in the operation that will either grow revenues, reduce costs, or measurably mitigate risks. From a Lean standpoint in a regulated industry, rework to meet regulations is usually fertile…[Read more]

SPC should not be a yes / no question. Do you ever want to give up control? Your real issue should be: when Cpk shows excellent capability, what adjustments to sampling rate can I tolerate to reduce control costs without jeopardizing quality of delivery. With a Cpk of 3 you might make some small reductions in sampling frequency, while with Cpk…[Read more]

Hi Nadeem,There is an underlying issue to your problem, which will always be an obstacle to improvement. WHY (ask this 5 times) does your organization want to measure / improve efficiency? Is it to reduce headcount? – then you will never get cooperation on measures.I suggest you move from DMAIC to Lean and target applying the existing skills…[Read more]

What do you mean “overproduction is not a concern”? Overproduction represents working capital investment, storage costs, and waste when your customer wants a shift in the product and you have to scrap the obsolete overproduced material.
As you tune your process steps to match the takt time, there is less Work-In-Progress between process steps…[Read more]

Perhaps I have misunderstood your posting, but my first reaction is put down Frederick Taylor and pick up W. Edwards Deming.Do not set standards. Measure your current performance: mean & s.d. and identify and prioritize root causes to variation. Eliminating those causes will naturally improve your variation and likely reduce your mean. The…[Read more]

Until you have identified and eliminated (with confirmation) a special cause, there is no reason to remove it from the population. Otherwise; as you indicated, someone is only drawing pretty pictures and is not improving the process, nor improving quality delivery to your customers.

Agree with you whole-heartedly that you should NOT “throw out” data, just because it is inconvenient to a business leader. Ask the business leader whether the customers’ expectations are different during that special time of year. The process needs to meet customer expectations every time the customer has a need.

During the period of your raw material lead-time, there is accumulating uncertainty about what real sales demand will be. That leads to safety stocks which represent over-investment in inventory (working capital). By reducing lead-time, you should be able to get your material planners to reduce the safety stocks, because there is a shorter…[Read more]

Go to http://www.nist.gov and look for Standard Reference Materials.  You can choose Physical Properties and then select Metrology. There are further refinements in selection, which will depend on what you are trying to determine with your assay (optical, thermodynamic, microscale dimensional, …)

Agree strongly with Len G.  Be very very careful on measuring TTs. You probably have two populations (administrative actions and problem resolution).  If you drive “problem resolution” to a very short time, you will find that “closing tickets” is the accomplishment and no one will be interested in finding and killing root causes.  In fact, if so…[Read more]