As the nature of Lean Six Sigma, which can be implemented by any business organization and irrespective of its size, it is also possible implemented in Packaging Industry.

Clients of packaging firm expect and demand the best possible quality in the least possible cost. And the nature of this industry, packaging materials are like raw materials and it is the main contributor of overall packaging costs. Packaging company usually concentrate on single cost component. Imagine what is the impact of a small percentage improvement in the packaging process will result to the reduction in overall costs.

This is why Lean Six Sigma becomes interest of most packaging company since Lean helps with the same purpose – such as reducing costs without affecting the quality of the final outcome – and streamlines the existing processes with the best possible use of existing manpower. It is able to achieve because Read the rest of this entry »

Are you satisfied with what you get? Can you improve what you have achieved so far? Usually people create barriers for improvement or simply think they do not need it since everything run smoothly. Nothing goes wrong! You are not completely satisfied, but it is a comfort zone and people start accepting the situation. So does the process. The hardest part to improve is when the process is stable. No indicator such as special cause of variation that need your attention and investigation. But still, a stable process can be improved.

Common cause variation usually hiding somewhere in the system and are sometimes assumed to be unavoidable. Actually they are waiting there to be found and often very rewarding to improve the process by reduce this common cause variation. With so many people involve in the process – operators, supervisors, managers – there are enough ideas for improvement to make a significant impact.

There are so many different methods to manage this common cause. Some well-known methods are Read the rest of this entry »

By: SSCX - Six Sigma Indonesia Center of Excellence

Have you ever get an “out of control” or sometimes called an “unstable” variation? Then your process is affected by special cause of variation. You are lucky if it is identified earlier with timely data because this kind of variation tends to relies on people’s memories on what made the occurrence different from other data. People will easily forget an unusual event or circumstances that triggered the special variation.

To manage this kind of variation, we usually removing the special causes because they are harmful or sometimes integrating them when they are beneficial, but the last option is a rare happening case. What steps should you do when facing this cause?

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To keep on track on your daily activity, it is best advice to make a schedule for the whole day. Usually for personal use, you would make the schedule in your mind. If you are working, your boss will be very happy if you could deliver a one week or one month schedule activity with the targeted goal to achieve. So do with project!

Many techniques on project management scheduling are available. One powerful technique to create the project schedule is Gantt Chart. This is a common visual reporting device contain graphic displays of the work breakdown, total duration needed to complete tasks, as well as percentage of completion. Illustrated with bar chart, it conveys the information of start and finish date of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project. It also can be used to show current schedule status using percent-complete shadings and a vertical “TODAY” line (25 Dec) as shown below.

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Recall the L.A. Law legal movie series, there were always situations where the judge in the dilemma of guilty or not guilty towards the defendant. It is a common situation in the court that based on the evidence, they have to make verdict. Imagining this situation, there are two choices possibility in the actual condition and the judge result. To get the idea, let us see below tabulation.

See, we have 4 results from those combinations which True positive, Type I error, Type II error, and True Negative. The true positive and true negative clearly gives idea of the result match with actual condition. But how about Type I and II error?

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My grandma likes to bake cookies! With her secret recipe in her lovable kitchen, she can make the same delicious cookies again and again all around year. She has decades of experiences in baking cookies, but still, there were times where her cookies failed or not met her standards. In some occasion, she could not obtain good ingredients or suddenly there was electricity blackout while stirring the eggs or even her gas run out in the middle of baking. This unusual variation is called a “special cause”.

Imagine that this special cause happen in your continuous processing that produce hundreds or thousands of products in a day. Sure it will bring billions of cost in form of scrap and rework if this occurs.

Every process is varies. We know that there is an inherent variation, but it varies between predictable limits. For many, many processes, it is important to notice special causes of variation as soon as they occur.

Then, what is “common cause” variation?
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After reading the “Speaking the Language of Sigma” article, some of you would probably wander how to find out your process sigma level accurately. It is true that the table shown in the previous article is in range, not exactly reflecting the current sigma situation in your process.

First, the calculation of a Sigma level is based on the number of defects per million opportunities (DPMO). In order to calculate the DPMO, you should gather three data parameters, which are:
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Statistical Process Control (SPC) is a procedure developed by Walter Shewhart in the early 1920s. SPC is the primary analysis tool of quality improvement that able to help you to monitor process behavior and detect and eliminate the source of variation in the process that could not be attributed to the routine operation of the process, e.g., a very high or low observation compared with “typical” process performance, occurs.

Whether you track revenues, billing errors, or the dimensions of manufactured components, SPC can help you measure, understand and control the variables that affect your business processes.
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No idea on how Lean Six Sigma tools can improve your process? Take a look at this company example, a producer of liquid glue, where they could save more than 20% from total sales by significantly reduce its inventory.

The success key in implementing Lean Six Sigma is the participation and involvement of the person who do the processes work, that are operators and engineers. Combine with Lean Six Sigma team, they tries to get the root cause problem by initially gathering all process data, finding variations under control and reduce scrap and rework. Then they use the 5Whys to explore the cause/effect relationships underlying this problem. Collaborate with the Ishikawa diagram, which also known as The Fishbone Diagram will give more details the cause and effect relation. Next they use the Lean tools, such as 5S – Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, Shitsuke, and Kanban, to reduce the work-in-process and inventory. And voila! With simple Lean Six Sigma tools, they able to reduce the inventory and improved the cash flow.

Still confuse with the Lean Six Sigma idea?
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What is the major continuing problem in most manufacturing companies?
Probably you will skip to mention the scrap or rework since it is a typical issue that faced regularly in your company.

Manufacturing people mostly have familiarized with Lean Manufacturing tools that can improve the speed of processes by reducing waste. But to solve deeper issues related to quality, precision and process variation, they should use next step method known as Lean Six Sigma. This method designed to tackle waste and variation issues using both the Lean and Six Sigma tools with outcome of both speed and accuracy.

Lean Six Sigma can be applied to the front office as well as the shop floor – anywhere waste and errors occur. In shop floor, you can address the hidden costs of quality issues e.g. downtime, overtime, expedites costs, cycle times, and lost sales. Capacity will be a problem as business growing and add more sales, thus they have to deal with this issues sooner or later.

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