Quality and Innovation

Green Six Sigma, also called “Green Sigma” by IBM, refers to a Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma (LSS) project in which the tangible benefits are also environmentally conscious – such as reducing landfill waste, reducing energy requirements, reducing variation in energy usage, and systematically conserving energy or other natural resources (e.g. water). In addition to the environmental benefits, there are also often cost reductions – trash service can be expensive, especially if the refuse needs to be hauled or special pick-ups must be arranged.

Although the term may be new, the practice is not! One of the pillars of the Toyota Production System, which developed in the early days after World War II, was its aggressive attitude towards waste – Toyota was the first company to achieve zero landfill waste in all of its operations. The tools and techniques of Green Six Sigma are identical to those used in any other LSS project.

In its 18 August 2008 press release “A Measured Approach to Going Green“, IBM describes the “Green Sigma” consulting offering. It’s nice that the company is calling attention to the fact that established methodologies can be used to promote sustainability, but don’t be confused – it’s not a novel approach.

Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is a structured problem-solving approach for improving quality and productivity. Lean approaches focus on improving speed and flow in business processes, which leads to the outcome of reducing waste. Tools such as value stream mapping (VSM), flow diagrams, 8D, FMEA, and OPCP are typically used. Six Sigma methods seek to reduce variation and/or defects in either processes or products. In these cases, methods such as statistical process control, design of experiments, and “Design for X” are often employed. The target metric is typically “Six Sigma”, which represents no more than 3.4 defects for every million opportunities you have to generate a defect. This means that how you define a defect is pretty important!

But what about if you want to take an integrated approach to problem solving, where you think about how reducing waste, reducing variation, and reducing defects are all inter-related? It is in precisely these cases that Lean Six Sigma is so valuable. Pundits advocating Lean will rightly note that Six Sigma methods don’t reduce waste; Six Sigma enthusiasts will point out that Lean can’t help you remove defects or manage variation. But what if the special cause that’s confounding your process is also generating tons of waste? Makes sense to look at the problem holistically, which is what LSS helps you do.

Both Lean and Six Sigma help us identify forces that make our processes unnecessarily complex. It is by rooting out these causes that we achieve the primary goals of LSS: reducing waste, reducing variation, and reducing defects. Using a framework like DMAIC helps us pose the following questions:

• What’s your quality goal? (Hint: choose the most important from the three above)
• How do you define a defect? (Note: this often changes for each new LSS project)
• What tools can you use to achieve that quality goal, given a broad selection of Lean and Six Sigma methods to choose from?

(Specific examples illustrating how to ask and interpret these questions using DMAIC will be presented in future articles, along with a description of how to use the Lean Six Sigma Quality Transformation Toolkit – LSSQTT – to execute your project.)

A successfully completed Lean Six Sigma project will generate a clear tangible value. This could include financial savings, savings in time and effort, reduced costs of materials, improved cash flow, cycle time reduction, or improved (measurable) customer satisfaction. Typically, a single Lean Six Sigma project will improve only one or two of these variables. Don’t try to improve all at once, which could get you bogged down in details. Iteration is the key!

First, you should familiarize yourself with what a Lean Six Sigma project is all about.

The Lean Six Sigma (LSS) projects I’ve done in the past have all used the Lean Six Sigma Quality Transformation Toolkit (LSSQTT), a structured problem-solving system that’s currently packaged as an Excel workbook (but has evolved in the past, and can be expected to evolve in the future to adapt to new software technologies). The LSSQTT was developed by John W. Sinn of Bowling Green State University. (Feel free to email me at nicole dot radziwill at espresso-labs dot-com if you have any other questions about the LSSQTT.)

1. Define your problem in terms of quality goals
2. Set up your team’s quality management system, which often involves applying the DMAIC methodology
3. Apply a lean tool (e.g. VSM, SIPOC) or a Six Sigma tool (e.g. SPC) to your problem
4. Evaluate the results
5. Evaluate how everyone on your team performed during this phase of the project
6. Review results, identify ways to apply the results to further analysis of the problem, and identify ways to improve personal performance through the next phase of the project
7. Apply those findings to your problem and your quality management system; introduce a new lean or Six Sigma tool, and do Steps 4-7 again
8. Every so often, “lean out” your project findings and boil the portfolio down to its most important elements
9. Formulate conclusions

Here are some examples of completed project portfolios using the LSSQTT. Only the second could be considered a “classical” LSS project; the first is a creative example of how to structure any project the same way you would reduce waste or reduce variation.

• http://qualityandinnovation.com/qs726
• http://qualityandinnovation.com/tech682
• (If you have a Phase II LF/SF portfolio that you want to post, please email it to me at nicole dot radziwill at espresso-labs dot-com and I will make the web page! Those of you who have actually done these portfolios will know what I’m talking about.)

One of the things I worried about when I first started using the LSSQTT was: Is this right? Is this “the correct way” to do a Lean Six Sigma project? What I discovered as a result of going through the process was that two things make a LSS project: a) using any structured problem-solving approach, usually based on DMAIC, and b) achieving tangible results that might include reducing costs, improving customer satisfaction, improving cycle time or efficiency, or reducing time and effort (labor). You don’t have to worry about finding the “right” approach – but you do have to find an approach that helps you and your team take an ambiguous, unconstrained problem and generate real business value.