Personal Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
Personal Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
Personal Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
Black Belt
by Jay Arthur
Table of Contents
Skip Six Sigma Green and Black Belt Training: Educate Yourself 1
So, If You Don’t Need To Know Everything, What Do You Need To Know? 2
Principle #1: Focus On the Vital Few, Not the Trivial Many 2
In The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman argues that you don’t need an MBA to succeed
in business. “You don’t need to know everything,” he says. “You only need to under-
stand a few critical important concepts that provide most of the value.”
I’d like to argue that the same is true of Lean Six Sigma. Joseph Juran often said:
“Vital few, trivial many.” You only need to know a vital few things to solve most
problems. Over the last 25 years, I’ve used the same seven tools to solve most
problems and rarely needed anything else. This leads me to paraphrase Kaufman:
Skip Six Sigma Green and Black Belt Training: Educate Yourself
• Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Training is expensive and time consuming. It costs
thousands of dollars and four weeks of your time.
• Black Belt training doesn’t differentiate between the vital few and the trivial
many; it teaches everything. From a Lean perspective, this is a form of
overproduction—teaching too much leads to confusion.
• This graduate level approach to Six Sigma enencourages the use of complex,
expensive tools that demand more time, money and effort.
Sadly, Six Sigma training isn’t very effective. One Six Sigma consultant remarked
that one business spent $4 million with his company but had no bottom line
improvement.
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So, If You Don’t Need To Know Everything, What Do You Need To Know?
You need to know what problems you can solve with Lean Six Sigma. There are
three main kinds of problems you can eliminate directly with Lean Six Sigma:
These are the three silent killers of productivity and profitability. Solving these
problems will increase sales, profit margins, customer satisfaction, employee
satisfaction and retention in an indirect fashion.
Principle #1: Focus On the Vital Few, Not the Trivial Many
There are two main causes of delay: waiting and unnecessary movement. Usually, a
product or service spends too much time waiting between steps in a process.
People and materials usually have to move too far, too often, which causes
unnecessary movement and delay. Two tools can easily diagnose these issues:
value stream mapping to eliminate delays and spaghetti diagramming to eliminate
unnecessary movement.
The 3-57 Rule: After years of examining processes, I have found that people are
only working on the product or service for 3 minutes out of every hour. The other
57 minutes are consumed by delay. Eliminate those 57 minutes and you can
double productivity and boost profit margins by 20% or more.
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Great News: Eliminating delays also prevents defects, mistakes and errors. Not
having to pick a product up or put it down eliminates the chances for error. You
can’t miss a step or duplicate a step if you never put it down.
Just one step out of 25 causes over half of the waste and rework. Eliminating
delays reduces defects, mistakes and errors by as much as 50%. But you’ll need
some other tools to eliminate the remaining 50%. To reduce defects, shift your
focus from the gaps between steps to the steps themselves. You’ll need tools to:
Almost every company tracks its defects, mistakes and errors in an Excel spread-
sheet. Every row in the spreadsheet identifies the what, where, when, how and
why of the defect, but few people know how to summarize this data using pivot
tables to count and categorize the defects. This is the secret to finding the invisible
low hanging fruit in any business.
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Once the defects have been summarized with pivot tables, most people use
simple line or column charts to monitor business performance. Unfortunately,
these charts can’t tell you the first thing about whether the process is performing
consistently and predictably or not. To analyze performance use a performance
chart (a.k.a., control chart). These charts have been around for almost 100 years,
but were hard to create and were found mainly in manufacturing plants. Now
they are easy to create in Excel using the QI Macros.
Processes are either stable and predictable, or unstable and unpredictable. When a
process is unpredictable, use root cause analysis to find out why it’s unpredictable
and implement changes to bring it back to stable, predictable performance.
Once you start improving your processes, use performance charts to monitor the
process, because defects, mistakes and errors will happen so infrequently that you
won’t be able to detect an increasing error rate with your five senses. The only way
to detect unstable conditions will be with a performance chart.
Pareto Chart (Tool #4): Once you’ve determined your error rate, categorize the
types and costs of defects. Fix the worst first. The Pareto chart turns Pareto’s 80/20
rule into a vivid chart that laser-focuses improvements.
A Pareto chart sorts the errors in descending order. The left-most bar shows the
worst of the worst. (Vital few, trivial many.) It also shows how much each bar
contributes to the total problem. Sometimes, we have to dive deeper into the first
bar to see if there’s a Pareto within it.
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The 4-50 Rule: Four percent of any business causes over 50 percent of the
mistakes, errors, defects, waste, rework and lost profit. That’s just one step
out of 25.
Tar pit: Trying to solve more than one problem (bar) at a time.
Tar pit: Not drilling down far enough. Narrow your focus to maximize results.
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After implementation, it’s simply a matter of validating that the change created
the desired effect. Did it reduce the error rate? Did it reduce or eliminate the “big
bar” on the Pareto?
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Simply centering the data can still leave points above and below the specification
limits. In this case, you would want to both center the process and reduce the
spread.
Once you’ve narrowed the focus using data, you can convene a team of experts to
figure out how to reduce or eliminate the spread and off-centeredness. Once the
team implements the solution, use a performance chart and histogram to verify
and monitor that the process has improved.
In the example below, you can see that the process is now centered on the
histogram and the spread has been reduced.
This is all relatively simple if you have the data and tools to chart it. Only a hand-
ful of tools are needed to find and prevent fires, thereby saving a ton of money.
You don’t need to know everything to start saving time and money; you just need
to know how to use the Magnificent Seven Tools of Lean Six Sigma. Every few
hours you invest in eliminating delays, defects and defects will return hundreds of
hours and thousands of dollars in savings.
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About Jay Arthur
Jay is a frequent speaker at Lean Six Sigma conferences and is the author of
many popular Lean Six Sigma books published by McGraw Hill including
Lean Six Sigma Demystified and Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals. He is also the
developer of QI Macros SPC Software for Excel.
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