Michael L. George - The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook: A Quick Reference Guide to 100 Tools for Improving Quality and Speed

A Quick Reference Guide to Nearly 100 Tools for Improving Process Quality, Speed, and Complexity

Michael L. George

David Rowlands

Mark Price

John Maxey

with contributions from

Paul Jaminet Kimberly Watson-Hemphill Chuck Cox

Copyright 2005 by George Group. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Acknowledgments

It takes a lot of expertise to make a book like this a reality. Wed like to thank Bill Lawson, Malcolm Upton, Bill Kastle, Kim Bruce, Stephen Wilson, and everyone else at George Group who lent their expertise. Writing, editorial, and layout kudos to Sue Reynard; proofing courtesy of Brenda Quinn; graphics support by Lawson Communications.

DMAIC (pronounced Duh-MAY-ick) is a structured problem-solving methodology widely used in business. The letters are an acronym for the five phases of Six Sigma improvement: Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control. These phases lead a team logically from defining a problem through implementing solutions linked to underlying causes, and establishing best practices to make sure the solutions stay in place.

The structure of DMAIC encourages creative thinking within boundaries such as keeping the basic process, product, or service. If your process is so badly broken that you need to start over from scratch or if youre designing a new product, service, or process, use Design for Lean Six Sigma (DMEDI), not covered in this book.

This book assumes that most readers will work on DMAIC projects selected for them by managers or sponsors. (If this is not the case and you are involved in the project selection process, see p. 26 at the end of this chapter for a quick overview.

There are two primary options for implementing DMAIC:

1) Project-team approach

Black Belts deployed full-time to projects

Team members work on the project part-timework on the project is interspersed with regular work

Full involvement by all team members in all phases of DMAIC

Duration can be 1 to 4 months depending on scope (some go longer; shorter is better because you can realize gains more quickly)

2) Kaizen approach

Rapid (1 week or less), intense progress through all of DMAIC except full-scale implementation

Preparatory work on Define, and sometimes on Measure, done by a subgroup (team leader and a Black Belt, for instance)

Rest of the work done by the full group during several days or a week when they work ONLY on the project (participants are pulled off their regular jobs)

The basic DMAIC steps (pp. 4 to 19) apply to both of these models. Additional guidance on conducting a Kaizen project is provided on pp. 20 to 25.

DMAIC is a valuable tool that helps people find permanent solutions to long-standing or tricky business problems. The basic framework works well in a wide variety of situations, but using DMAIC does involve time and expense. So you should weigh the costs of using DMAIC against the benefits and the costs of skipping some steps or jumping right into solutions. Two indicators that you should follow all of DMAIC: