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Organization-Wide Planning and Deployment (BOK I)

1. Course Introduction and Welcome

Hey, welcome to the Six Sigma Black Belt Course. Before I talk about course content, let me introduce myself. My name is Sandeep Kumar, and I have been in the quality profession for more than 30 years. Regarding online learning, I started QualityGurus.com way back in 2007, and for the last ten years, I have been offering free online courses on that website and other quality-related information. On that side, I have 40,000-plus students registered on Udemy. I have been teaching for more than two years, and this is my 11th course on Udemy. And here I have more than 150 students registered in my courses. And I am thankful to all those 150 students who have shown confidence in my courses. Thank you all. When we talk of Six Sigma Black Belt, we need to understand the hierarchy of Six Sigma courses. At the very beginning, you do the Six Sigma White Belt. Six Sigma White Belt is a very high-level introductory course. Mostly, this is suitable for management-level people or for people who are not directly working with Six Sigma. They just need a high-level overview. Then comes Six Sigma, yellow belt. This is your first step into the Six Sigma world. If you are taking Six Sigma seriously with a Six Sigma Yellow Belt, you are able to do a small-scale improvement project using some basic quality tools. The next level in the hierarchy is Six Sigma Green Belt. "Green belt" gives you a more in-depth understanding of Six Sigma tools. And with Six Sigma Green Belt, you will be able to do medium-sized projects and medium-sized improvement projects in your organization. The Six Sigma Black Belt is the next level in the hierarchy. With the help of a Six Sigma Black Belt, you will be able to do more complex interdisciplinary projects. Projects that necessitate collaboration with multiple disciplines cross boundaries between them. So those are the sort of projects you will be able to do once you have completed the Six Sigma Black Belt body of knowledge. After the six-sigma black belt comes the master black belt. Master Black Belt is the one who basically coaches black belts. I'm not going into that because I don't have that course on Udemy yet. Another course that I have on Udemy is Six Sigma Statistics Using Minitab 17. Here in this course, my emphasis is to teach Minitap 17. Minitap 17 is a tool—a piece of software—that aids in performing complex statistical analyses. All these courses (white belt, yellow belt, green belt, and black belt) are available on Udemy. Before enrolling in the black belt course, ensure that you have either completed the yellow belt and green belt courses on Udemy or that you are already aware of that level of knowledge. The Black Belt involves a lot of statistics. There are a lot of complex concepts here. I've done my best to simplify these concepts, so that everyone will be able to understand them. But still, you need some background knowledge. So I again emphasise that you either take "yellow belt" and "green belt" or make sure that you are aware of those concepts. So, coming to this specific course, which is Six Sigma Black Belt, this particular course is aligned with the body of knowledge provided by the American Society for Quality, which is an ASQ-Certified Six Sigma Black Belt course. So, if you go to the ASQ website and look at the Certified Six Sigma Black Belt Examination, this course will cover the body of knowledge provided for that particular exam. After each section, you will have quizzes. There are quizzes to assess your knowledge and understanding of the section. Additionally, each section will have downloadable slides. So at the end of each section, you can get the PDF version of all the slides. You can use that for making notes or for studying later on. Another important thing about this course is that it is specifically focusing on the ASQ Certified Six Sigma Black Belt Exam. So in that example, you don't have software; you don't get access to Minit Tab; you don't get access to Microsoft Excel or Sigma Excel. What you need to do is use a simple, ordinary calculator to do the calculations. So in this course, I have done all the calculations that are required using a simple calculator. In addition to this, at certain places I have provided information related to Microsoft Excel. How do you do these calculations using Excel or Sigma Excel? I'm not covering Minitab here in this course because I have a separate one that is specifically focusing on using Minitab 17 for doing all these statistical calculations. So that's a separate course. Mini Tab is a separate course. But this course mainly involves hand calculations using a calculator. Or at certain places, I'll be teaching the concept using Microsoft Excel and Sigma Excel. Both of these software you can use to do complex statistical calculations relations. So, with this understanding, let's get started with the Six Sigma Blackbird course.

2. Introduction - Section 1

This course has been prepared based on the Body of Knowledge provided by the American Society for Quality. So if you go to Asq.org and look for the Body of Knowledge for a certified Six Sigma Black Belt Adult Course, that's the structure I'm using in this course. This course has nine broad topics. The first topic is this one, which is organization-wide planning and deployment. And the number twelve at the top indicates that this topic will generate twelve questions. So this is topic number one. Topic number two will be organisational process management and measures. In that, we will be talking about financial measurements and other measurements. Topic three will be on team management. How do you manage the team? That's topic number three. Then, after topic numbers 4567 and 8, these cover DMAC steps. And when I say "Mac d" for define, So topic number four will be in a defined phase. Topic number five will be in the measure phase. Then we will have an analysed phase, an improved phase, and the control phase of the DMA process. So that will cover topic number four to topic number eight. The last one, which is topic number nine, will be on design for Six Sigma. So that's the general plan we'll be following in this course. Coming back to topic number one, which is organisation planning and deployment, What are we going to learn from this topic? In this too, there are two broad sections. One is an organization-wide consideration. We will be discussing some fundamental issues in this article. Fundamental things like fundamentals of Six Sigma and Lean, the history, the philosophy, the benefits of these. Then we will be talking about various improvement methodologies, such as PDCA and DMAC Kaizen 8D. So in addition to Six Sigma, you can have various other improvement methodologies that will be covered in this section. Then we will be talking about project selection and prioritization. How do you select a project, and when you have a number of projects, how do you prioritise those? So in this section you will have some templates. Also download those templates and use them for project selection and prioritization. We will be talking about relationships among the systems and processes' stakeholders. We will also talk about strategic planning. And when I say strategic planning, a Six Sigma project has to be aligned with the strategic objectives of the organization—what this company wants to do. You cannot have a Six Sigma project that has nothing to do with the objective or the vision of the company. So when you select projects, you need to take those things into consideration. So in this section we will be talking about the strategic planning process, and that is covered under the Mossa. And in that, we will be talking about the vision, the mission, the objective strategy, and the action plan—how these things relate to each other. And then in addition to that, when we talk of strategic planning, we will be talking about some tools. tools such as SWAT. SWAT is strength, weakness, opportunity, and threats. We will talk about that. We will talk about pests. We will talk about business, continuity, planning, haunch, and candy. A lot of things to be covered in this section. Now, coming to the second part of this topic, which is leadership, In leadership, we will be talking about various belts. So, when we say white belt, yellow belt, green belt, black master, black belt, champion, and financial analyst, what are their respective rules that we will be covering under leadership? Then we'll look at the challenges of implementing Six Sigma, as well as the challenges of making any change. So here we will be talking about different types of organisational structures. The reasons Six Sigma projects fail We will talk about the things you need to take care of when you do any Six Sigma project. You need to take into consideration what could make your Six Sigma project fail. And then we will be talking about change management models. So here we have two models, Levin's and Quarter's model. How do you manage change in an organization? because any Six Sigma project will lead to some change. How you make those changes effective in the organisation that we will be covering using these two models depends on your culture. There are a lot of things to do here, but the only thing you can do is just get started. Because without starting, you cannot complete this course. One thing which you might want to do ifyou have already a good exposure to Six Sigma, and if you want to skip topic number one, two and three for now, you can do that. You can straight away go to topic number four because four to eight will be covering the DMAT process. And I would suggest that you do Section 45678 in the sequence only because those things are interrelated with each other. Topic number one, two, three and topic number nine. You can do these things whenever it is convenient for you. So let's get started with Section Number One here. Yeah.

3. Fundamentals of Six Sigma and Lean methodologies (BOK I.A.1)

Hey, welcome to this section. In this section, we will try to understand the history of Six Sigma and the history of Lean, even through this training course on Six Sigma. But still, we need to have some understanding of lean as well. And that's what we are doing in this section, just to have some basic knowledge of lean and Six Sigma. Let's start that with a Six Sigma timeline. How did Six Sigma get invented? What's the history of that? Even though you would see that Six Sigma was initiated in 1987 by Motorola, that's what you generally see. But Six Sigma is basically a package of a lot of quality tools. These quality tools were developed much before 1987. One of the tools that form the basis of Six Sigma is the control chart. Control charts were developed way back in 1924 by quality guru Walter Schuhart. Notice the difference between now and 1924. So, going back to when Motorola developed Six Sigma, Six Sigma assisted Motorola in raising the quality level, which resulted in Motorola receiving the Malcolm Bellbridge National Quality Award just a year after initiating this Six Sigma concept. Motorola was in real bad shape at that time, and this Six Sigma concept has helped them a lot. Looking at the success of Six Sigma at Motorola, a number of other companies adopted that. Other companies, such as GE, General Electric, Dow Chemical, Dupont Honeywell, and Whirlpool, were early adopters. However, it is likely that many other companies have since adopted Six Sigma to improve their processes, reduce defect levels, and satisfy their customers. The credit for inventing Six Sigma goes to Motorola. But then General Electric has shown how to implement that. They have implemented that in a big way in the organization. The promotions of the managers depended on whether they were Six Sigma black belts or not. There was profit sharing and there were direct monetary rewards related to Six Sigma. So this gives a brief history of Six Sigma's timeline. The same thing we will see on the next slide is a timeline. Let's quickly look at that as well. So, as we talked about on the previous slide, this is similar information in a graphical format. As you could see here, 1924 control charts were invented, and then Motorola developed the Six Sigma concept, which Allied Signal adopted that.1995, General Electric adopted that, and after that, lots of other companies, such as Johnson & Johnson Food, Nissan, Honeywell, and many other companies, adopted Six Sigma. So this gives the brief history of Six Sigma. Now let's move on to learn about the history of lean, which we will do on the next slide. The concept of lean manufacturing goes back to 1900, when Frederick Taylor set up the system of motion study and standardisation of work processes. That was the time when you could say the foundation of modern lean was laid, in 1900 and later in the 1920s and 1930s. Sometime in the 1950s, Henry Ford used the concept of lean car assembly, establishing the assembly line. Later, from 1950 to 1960, That was a big period when Japanese made a lot of concepts, invented a lot of concepts related to lean. A lot of concepts that you will see today that are part of Toyota manufacturing or lean manufacturing were invented during that 1950–1960 period. Later on in the year 2000, James Womeck wrote a book, and that was sort of an initiation of the lean concept in the western world. As a result, he documented the lean processes. So after learning about the history of Six Sigma and Lean, let's look at the philosophy behind these two concepts. So let's look at the philosophy behind Six Sigma First, and then we will talk about lean. Six Sigma has these four points, which it emphasises on. One must know what is important to a customer. Whatever improvement project you are doing, make sure that it is important to your external customer. So any improvement project should be aligned with customer need, customer expectation, or customer satisfaction. A term called critical to quality says that what is important to the customer is So that's the first thing in the philosophy of Six Sigma: that anything that is done is aligned with customer need or is critical to customer requirements. The second thing is that Six Sigma emphasises reducing defects. And when I say reducing defects, I mean reducing defects to the level of 3.4 defects per million opportunities, which is the Six Sigma target. And we put it here as 3.4 DPMO, or defects per million opportunities. So that is the target of a Six Sigma process. Another thing Six Sigma looks at is centred around the target. So, for example, if you have a tolerance, say the piece you're making is 100 millimetres and you have a tolerance of plus or minus one millimetre in that plus or minus one millimeter, Six Sigma emphasises aiming for 100 rather than 99 or 101. The target should be 100. so that your process is focused If your process is centered, you will have fewer defects. That's another emphasis on Six Sigma. And Six Sigma believes in reducing variation because variation is the enemy of quality. even though variation is everywhere. Anything that is different has variation. But then that is the enemy of quality because quality is consistency. That's where Six Sigma emphasises reducing variation. So these are the four focus areas of Six Sigma. Let us see on the next slide what the philosophy or emphasis of lean manufacturing is. Let's move on to the next slide for that. Lean philosophy has five points. The first point is value. Specify what creates value from a customer perspective. This is exactly similar to what we talked about in Six Sigma as well. You need to understand what is important to a customer and what is critical to a customer. The second philosophy of lean manufacturing is the value stream. Determine all of the value processes that exist along the process chain. This is where Lean looks at removing non-value-added processes from the work. So you have a job; there are a number of actions that are value-added and provide value to clients, for which the client is willing to pay. So those are valued activities. Non value addition activities are the activities for which client is not paying. For example, if you are doing inspection at the end of production, the client is not paying for your inspection. Clients are paying for the product that you are making. so that inspection becomes a nonvalue-added activity. And this is the second point in identifying the value stream. The next item in the lien is flow. Make sure that the value-adding process flows. So what does that mean? Is it possible to reduce inventory in the process by handling one piece at a time so that there isn't a lot of inventory in between processes? Because if you have more inventory between the processes, there is a good chance that the defects will be hidden. And if you have one item being processed at a time and there's no inventory in between, then any defect or problem that comes up will be highlighted and will get attended to too. That's the third item of the Lean philosophy. Fourth is pull. Make only what is needed by customers; don't create a lot of products and keep that as inventory. Because, as I earlier said, having more inventory basically hides the quality issue that you have. So, if the operator has 100 pieces in front of him and discovers a flaw in one of them, he can simply set that piece aside and work on the other. But if this operator has just one piece to work on, then that quality problem that arises needs to be addressed permanently. And that is the concept of making only what is needed at a time. And this, in turn, leads to flexibility. So you can have a number of different models you can prepare, number of different products you can prepare. You can switch quickly between one product to another product, one model to another model. Because you are working on pull, you are working on demand. What customers demand, not push, is that you produce first, and then your marketing or sales department pushes to sell that out. Coming to the fifth philosophy of Lean, which is perfection. And this is exactly similar to Six Sigma as well, where you are striving for perfection by continuously improving and continuously producing what customers want. So that way, you perfect your processes and remove defects from your work processes. So these five items form a loop, and this is a continuous loop. And this is what the philosophy of lean manufacturing is. So after learning about the history and philosophy of Six Sigma and Lean, let's look at the benefits of these two. Six Sigma and Lien Obviously, you can see that the benefits of both Six Sigma and Lean are to make customers happy, ensure that you don't have defects, and provide many other benefits. So let's look at that and see where these two sort of differ from each other. Let's start with the benefit of Six Sigma. Six Sigma generates sustained success. Sustaining success requires regular improvement projects and iteratively improving your process. Sustained success means that anything you have improved in the process is going to give you a repeated benefit. So, if you improve the defect rate today, it will continue to benefit you and the organisation for a number of years. That's something that Six Sigma does to generate sustained success. In Six Sigma, the projects are selected based on customer focus and profit. So one thing that is important in Six Sigma is the profit. That's where all the projects are focused on. Reduced defects lead to profits. Reduced defects lead to customer satisfaction, which leads to an increase in demand. Again, that leads to profit. So anything that you do in Six Sigma ultimately leads to profit. And that is the reason management is interested in Six Sigma. Because Six Sigma basically adds to the bottom line of the company, its project outcomes are tied to the financial reporting system. So, for any Six Sigma project involving financial reporting, what was the baseline state of the process prior to beginning the project? What was the defect rate before starting the project, and then what was after that? So how much of a defect has been reduced, and because of that, how many additional benefits have been provided to the company? That's what all these Six Sigma projects are focused on. In Six Sigma, you have a full-time black belt who is working on projects. And these projects will typically result in a million dollars in annual savings. That's sort of a target. Many companies have that. Any Six Sigma black belt working full-time results in a million-dollar benefit to the company every year, while only working on three or four projects per year. Any project ranging from two to three to four months And in Six Sigma, you have a recognition and reward system to provide motivation. So employees who are making improvements are motivated because there's a reward system attached to the savings. So that's how we can describe the benefits of Six Sigma. On the next slide, we will see some hard numbers related to benefits achieved by some early adopters, such as Motorola and General Electric. How much did they save by implementing Six Sigma? Let's see that on the next slide. So here we have the benefits that these companies have achieved. Examples include Motorola, General Electric, and Bacteria. These numbers have come from their balance sheets. Motorola, if you see that there was a fivefold growth in sales by implementing Six Sigma I'm not sure what time period this covered, but maybe this was two or three years. I'm not sure about that. And then the profit climbs by 20% per year after that. 20% increase in profits because of Six Sigma implementation. Cumulative saving of 14 billion over eleven years. So over a long period of time, there were$14 billion saving achieved because of Six Sigma projects. So that's something which Motorola achieved because of implementing Six Sigma. Look at the numbers created by General Electric. General Electric achieved a savings of $2 billion in three years. And this has become the number one company in the United States of America. Bacteria has achieved 200 million in savings by investing 30 million. You might be asking a question now. What does that investment mean? Any Six Sigma project requires investment because it is being worked on by someone. Let's say we said that Black Belt is working full time for the whole year. The money, the salary, or the benefit that you pay are investments. The number of times you need to change machines, the number of times you need to improve your processes, and the number of times you need to stop your work All of these things are investments that must be made quickly. So to achieve any benefit, you need to invest first. You need to invest in training; you need to invest in the time people spend on these projects. So there are a number of things where you pay and then get the benefit. So that's what Bechtel has done. spent $30 million on Six Sigma projects. And because of that they gained 200million savings coming to benefits by Lean manufacturing, what benefits do you achieve? What benefits does an organisation achieve by implementing Lean? The first thing is to reduce waste. That is the key to Lien. Waste reduction is key to the lien. Lien looks at value-added activities and non-value-added activities, removing non-value-added activities from the process. And that way, you reduce waste and extra work. That's the key emphasis of Lean. All these lead to customer satisfaction and improved quality. And as you remember, in the philosophy of Lean, we talked a lot about reducing inventory. Reducing inventory not only saves money, which gets tied up in the inventory, but also helps in improving quality. Because now you don't have any extra spare items to work on. If a problem has arisen, that problem needs to be resolved. So reducing inventory has a double benefit. Save money because you don't need to put money into inventory, which then helps in quality improvement as well. This reduces cycle time. cycle time so that you can quickly switch between different products. Lean helps in flexible manufacturing as well, so you can produce a number of products simultaneously, quickly switching from one product to another product. So that way, you reduce your inventory. So that's about flexible manufacturing. Lean looks at a safe workplace environment because the people who are working on the job are involved in the lean process. The first thing they need to do is clean their place. There's a practise called five S. Five S helps in clean workplace. If there's a clean workplace and everything is in place, there will be fewer safety issues. So lean helps in improving the safety of workplace as well. And of course, it improves the employee morale. Because employees are involved in these improvement processes, they see the value they can provide to the organisation by improving processes, and that helps improve the morale of the employees. So with this, we conclude our discussion on the comparison between Lean and Six Sigma. We talked about the timeline, we talked about the philosophy, and we talked.

4. Six Sigma, Lean, and Other Continuous Improvement Methodologies (BOK I.A.2)

Hey, welcome back. In the previous section, we talked about Six Sigma and Lean. We looked at the history, and we looked at the philosophy behind that in this section. Now let's look at some of the commonly used continual improvement tools or continual improvement methodologies. And in addition to this, in this section, we will learn about project selection. So when you come to Six Sigma, how do you select a project? And when you have so many projects, how do you prioritise that? Which project would you choose first? So we will be looking at these things in this section. Let's start with commonly used continual improvement methodologies. So we have a number of methodologies, approaches for continuous improvement, beginning with PDCA, the PDCA cycle, or as some call it, a PDSA. This was something which was developed by Walter Shoehart quality guru, Water Shoehart. And this was later made famous by Dr. Demy and Dr. Juran. So what is this PDCs sector? So PDCs stands for "Plan, Do, Check, and Act." If I say, then that is my plan. Do study and act. So that's a sort of loop you keep repeating. So you plan first, then you do that activity. And once you do that activity, then either you can say check or you can say study. And then, based on that, you act, take action based on your research, check, and then plan again. So this is a continual improvement cycle of PDCA. This is quite a commonly used methodology for continual improvement. Another one here is a three-step methodology. A "three" is basically a "three-page report." A three is a paper size. So you have a paper size of a four or a three. So a three is double a four. So if you take two four-page papers, a four-page paper, and then this joint together, it is a three. In US, this is also known as eleven x 17 sheet. So the planning is done on the a three sheet. It is a visual representation of PDC's cycle plan. Do check act. But instead of four steps here, you would have eight steps to doing that. So those are visually represented, shown on a three-sided sheet, and visually displayed to everyone. Where people can give suggestions, people can look at what improvement has been made. So that's a three-report or a three sheet. The next methodology of continual improvement is DMAC approach. So DMAC has arrived. DMAC is defined as "measure, analyze, improve, and control." So this is a DMAX cycle. So you first define a problem. Then you measure that—measure the current status of the problem. Then you analyse that. Whatever you have measured, you analyse it. And, based on this analysis, you improve that. You improve the process. Once you have improved the process, you control to see that the process remains at the improved state. since the course is Six Sigma. So we will be going through these DMAC approach, all these five stages in quite a detail in the later part of this course then we have another improvement tool or another improvement methodology which is 8D methodology. This is again similar to PDC's cycle, but this has eight steps, and this is quite widely used in the automobile industry. Another improvement methodology is the Kaizen approach. Kaiser is a small improvement, small improvement, improvement for good. So rather than taking a big step, you take a small step at a time. A small improvement at a time and a number of small improvements would lead to a bigger change in the organization. So that's a Kaizen approach or the Kaiser methodology of continual improvement. So this was sort of a high-level overview of what sort of methodologies or approaches we have for continual improvement.

5. Selecting Six Sigma Project (BOK I.A.2 Part 2)

So after talking about continual improvement methodologies, now let's look at Six Sigma. Back to Six Sigma If we have to make improvements, where do we start from? So we started with a project. We select a project, and we select the area for improvement. And how do we find out where to start with? There are a number of ways to figure out where to start and how to select a project. Project selection could come from internal factors or external factors. Let's look at external sources or external factors here. The reason could be the voice of the customer. For example, if our product is falling short of customers' expectations, and if we know that that is an area of improvement, that is the area where you can start your Six Sigma project. So what falls short of customer needs is one thing you could look at when deciding which project to take on. And if customer needs are changing, look at whether there's a new trend or whether there is a new product that is coming that is attracting more customers. So that would give you an idea of where to improve your own product or processes. So that was about the voice of the customer and looking at what the customer wants. Then you can look at the voice of the market: what are the market trends, what are the recent products, and what is the market moving towards? If you look at those things, you can probably come up with some ideas, some places where you can improve, and ways to make yourself more competitive in the market. Then you can look at the voice of competitors, what your competitors are doing, how they are doing better than you do, they have a better market share, bigger market share, which you want to capture. So you can see what your competitors are doing and where you stand in comparison to them. There is something called benchmarking as well. We will later talk about that. So benchmarking might help you look at what your competitors are doing, what the best in the class can do, or what the companies that are best in class are doing in that regard. So you can look at that, and based on that, you can decide where and how to improve. So these are some of the external sources for your Six Sigma project selector to consider when looking for areas for improvement. Now, on the next slide, let's look at some of the internal sources of improvement. So after looking at external sources of improvement, let's look at some of the internal sources. So, internal sources could be the voice of your process. The process will tell you what's going wrong. Process will tell you, through defects, repairs, and rework, that something is wrong here and that it needs to be addressed. So look at what your repair rate is, where you are doing rework, and how much money you are spending on that. This may give you an idea of what project to pursue if you are experiencing significant delays. So not only repairs and defects, but if something is getting delayed, look at that. Looking at some major wastes will give you an idea of where you need to improve. After looking at the voice of the process, you can look at the voice of the employees themselves, because employees or the people who are working at the process know much more than management knows. So talk to the employee; talk to the operators who are at the machine that is producing defects. That operator will give you much more insight than anything else. So talk to your employees what concerns and ideas employees have. But for that, you need to create a culture of openness where employees or people can come forward and tell you the problem. Because if the organisation has an atmosphere where reporting a problem means getting punished, you won't get this sort of feedback. So companies need to create an open environment where employees can voice their concerns. So that's how you select projects from internal sources and external sources. So what I will suggest to you is that you stop at this moment, take a sheet of paper, and write down in your own workplace what areas of improvement you can have. But then you would see that you have a huge list of items because a number of people have given their voices and given you a number of ideas. Which idea to select and where to start? That is the challenge that we will tackle in the next few slides. So, after searching internal and external sources for a six-sigma project, you will have a number of projects and items on your list of improvement ideas. But then each idea or each project will need a different level of effort and will have a different level of reward. So the level of effort and reward is represented here by a tree. At the bottom of the tree, you have low effort. You don't need to do much here. So there is a low effort, and since there's a low effort, then the gain will also be below the gain at the top of the tree. To pick these fruits, you need a high level of effort, and the reward will be high. So gains also will be high gain, high effort. That is how you can categorise your projects, whether they are low-offered, low-gain projects, high-offered, high-gain projects, or something in between. So if you look at this tree analogy, you will see there are ground fruits that are very intuitive and don't require too much skill. An example of that could be a bolt in the machine that is loose, and because of this loose bolt, there is a vibration that is creating a defect. If you know that this is your ground level fruit because you know the problem, you can easily fix that. That does not necessitate any investment, analysis, or study time. You just do that. Gains are also unlikely to be significant, but it is simple to accomplish. So, trying to grind fruit is probably something you should try first. If there are some common things that are very well known, attend to them. The next level of complexity will be low-hanging fruits. So low hanging fruits will be these area little bit more complex, take a little extra effort, but the gains also are better. These types of projects could be completed with the help of seven basic quality tools. Basic quality tools such as a histogram, pare to, chart, scatter, diagram, etc. The next level of complexity would be the bulk of fruits, where you would need a more complex analysis, more complex data collection, and a more complex study of the system that would lead to better results. The rewards will also be higher. This is where your skill as a Six Sigma Black Belt would come into play. The low hanging fruits here, probably a Six Sigma Yellow Belt or a green belt can do that. But here, you will need a Six Sigma Black Belt for this. And even if you are more skilled, then you can go for even higher levels of complexity in projects as you develop more skills in problem solving or process improvement. So this is how you analyse your projects. On the next slide, we will be looking at what three characteristics a Six Sigma project should have. Not every improvement idea is a Six Sigma project. Which one is a Six Sigma project and which is not? We will decide based on those three judgement criteria. If a project meets those three criteria, then we will say that this project is a Six Sigma project. If that doesn't mean that, then we can probably solve it with a much simpler approach than going through the entire Six Sigma methodology. So let's look at those three criteria on the next slide. So, out of the big list of projects you have, which one qualifies as a Six Sigma project? For that, you need to have these three things. Look at these three things, and these will tell whether that project is a Six Sigma project or not. Whether that project could be simply handled without much effort, or whether that really requires Six Sigma effort, So for these three characteristics, there's a gap between the current and the desired performance? Probably that might be in most of the cases you expect something and the actual is something less than that. So there has to be a gap between what is required and what is actually available. That's probably would be in many of the items which you have in the list. But then the cause of the problem is not clearly understood. That's where Six Sigma comes into the picture. If you know the cause of the problem, then you just attend. Earlier I talked about an example of a loose bolt, which was creating a vibration, which was creating a defect. If you know the cause of the problem, you can attend to that. But when you don't know the root cause of the problem, then you need to dig deeper into the problem. And that's where you need to go for a Six Sigma project, maybe Six Sigma. Maybe you could do it with just seven basic quality tools. But you need to understand the root cause of the problem. The third point is that the solution is not predetermined or that the optimal solution is not obvious. So, whatever solution you believe is the best solution for the problem, you either don't know or, if you do, it may not be the best solution. That is where you want to go deeper into the problem. Take a lot of measurements, do a lot of analysis of that, and based on that, decide your action plan. And for that, you need a Six Sigma project. So all these three characteristics should be present for any project to be qualified as a Six Sigma project. We now had a longer list of projects. Then we looked at that list to find out whether it qualifies as a Six Sigma projector or not and whether that project, or that list of projects, met these three requirements. So now we still have a list of Six Sigma projects. So now let's say we started with 100 items in that improvement list. Then we ended up as a ten or15 items as a Six Sigma project, which are qualified based on these three criteria. Then out of 1015, which project should I choose? For that, you need to prioritise your Six Sigma project. Which one goes first? Where will you put your money first? How do you do that? Let's go through that on the next slide. How do you prioritise your project? So we started our journey of continual improvement by looking at internal and external sources. We created a bigger list of areas where we could improve. Then we segregated based on those three criteria, whether that project was a Six Sigma project or not. So that way, we removed a number of items from that list that do not require a Six Sigma approach. So now we have a shorter list of projects that could be using the Six Sigma approach. Now, out of that list, also, which one is the first? You need to prioritise that. So here is one example of how you prioritise the Six Sigma project. Each company can have a different sort of approach, a different sort of matrix, and different sorts of parameters. Here is an example. Here. The company has decided that these are the four criteria for the project to go ahead. Number one is alignment with the strategic objective. And it's very important that your Six Sigma project be aligned with the strategic goals of the company. How much this is aligned to the strategic goal is one of the criteria for judgment, and out of one to five, this has a weightage of four. This is one example of what the company has done. You can use different weights and have different criteria. Another criterion that was addressed was the voice of the customer, which has a weight of three: how much effort or investment that project will require. This has a weight age of two, and the return of investment has a weight age of five. So highest weight is given to how much money do we get out of this six Sigma projects that has given highest weighted and how do we find that where we are on a particular criteria? For example, if the first criteria is alignment to a strategic objective, it is highly aligned to that objective. You give a rating of five, it is a low aligned to strategic objective, then you give a rating of one. Similarly, if you look at effort and investment, this is the other way around. If it is something that is quick and easy, that will be given number five. Because you want to give value to something that is easy and quick to do, and if that can give you the highest reward, that's good. And if it's complex and requires high investment, then the rating given here is one. And similarly, on the return on investment, you can decide what return you want from this company. They stated that if the return is greater than 100%, you should give it a five-star rating. So let's take example of two projects. So you have a project one which was selected and then there is a project too. And then you could have a number of other projects. Just for example, we have a project one and project two. Project one is a complex project, it's a complex project, big project, but the returns are also very high return. Project two, on the other hand, is simple and easy to complete but yields a low return. So how the rating has happened here is since the weighted is four, so four weighted is here. Then this was given a number of five because it was highly aligned with the strategic objective. So four into five gives you a rating of 20. Similarly, addressing the voice of the customer weightage comes here, and this is three in the rating because this is somewhat addressing the voice of the customer coming to the third one, which is effort and investment. The weight is two for this to come here, and then this is a complex project, as we said. So complex project means it gives you one as a rating. so you multiply these. So three by three becomes nine; two by one becomes two. And at the bottom, since there's a high return on investment and there's a weightage of five and a high return on investment, this gives a rating of 25. So you add 20 plus nine plus two plus 25 to get a rating of 56 for the complex project. And similarly, if you look at the Easy Project, it gives you a rating of 22. And then you can have a number of other ratings for a number of other projects. whatever you have evaluated. Then based on this, you can choose. So, probably, looking at this, you'd be sure to choose PS Project No. 1, even though it's a complex project and even though it requires investment. But the returns are also very high. So this is one method of prioritising projects—which one to pursue first and which one to pursue later.

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