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If, let’s say, I’m a director of operations at a, you know, paper mill [I don't even know].
Just a paper mill. And I know that I have inefficiencies in my process. I know that
the culture is not one that I feel like I can change. I can’t go up to my executive
board and change them, or I don’t want to; whatever. But I understand that I can improve
my process. Can I hire an expert to come in and just fix my processes so that I have lower
costs so that I’m producing more product with the same amount of resources that I can,
you know. Clearly that’s going to have a cost to me, but I’m going to get a lot of
benefit for the long term. I realize now that I’m not necessarily teaching my team to
fix problems on their own, but I’m fixing a lot of bottlenecks that are going to help
our operation. Can I do that? Is that an appropriate implantation of Lean Six Sigma?
You know, Mike, that’s a great question. I’m going to say, we would love it. If every
deployment of our customers was top down driven. Leadership and management totally engaged.
And, you know, alignment took place with the organization. Every project was strategically
linked to business indicators and so on. We would love that. That happens – and I’m
going to throw out, you know, a percentage. It may or may not be correct. I mean, it depends
on industries and so on, but – I’m going to say twenty-five, thirty-five percent of
the time. And sometimes, you know, a customer calls up and says, ‘We want a full deployment’.
Other times a customer will call us up and say, ‘You know what? We have a problem.
We have a fueling problem’, or ‘We have a first pass yield problem’, or ‘We have
a scrap rate that has just gone out of the roof. We can no longer tolerate it’, or
‘We’re getting ready to automate, and we have a process. We’re producing defects
at this rate, and we know that as soon as we automate, it’s not become very efficient
at producing defects because now it’s a hundred times faster’, or whatever. And
they will call us, and just in the last, I’m going to say, six months, we’ve probably
had about six companies that have had us come in and specifically help them solve an issue.
And you can do that, you know, several ways. We’ve had a company that says, ‘You come
in. You do what’s necessary to solve that problem. We don’t care if that’s gets
you into design of experiment. We’ll get data for you’, and so on. And we’ll come
in and we’ll do that; and we’ll solve their issue. And they’re very happy. They
pay their money, and so on.
They receive their benefit, and everybody moves on.
Receive their benefit, and you know what? Their bosses – their leadership – are
happy because the issue was solved, minimized cost, but they saw proof of concept. So now,
leadership knows it works. That’s the one benefit. I mean, that’s a benefit there
in addition to solving the problem.
Right.
We’ve had other companies that said, ‘Okay, we want you to come in. We’re going to give
you a team that is not well versed in Lean Six Sigma, but we’re going to give you a
team. We’re going to give you team members that are now going to be available for on
the job training. In other words, as necessarily, real time, you will train them in the tools
and the techniques they need at that time as you help them solve the problem’. Okay.
And that works, because the problem gets solved. And it’s happened most recently with us.
Problem gets solved, and now you leave and there’s an energized team that now gets
credit from the leadership and the management sponsorship for having solved a problem.
Right.
The nice thing about this is, they now have a skill set, or a knowledge of some tools
and techniques, that will maybe benefit them and help them initially, maybe, identify a
problem and start solving it on their own. Okay, they may come back to us again; whatever.
So, yes, to answer your question, you can, as a business, decide, you know what? We just
need the problem solved and then we’ll move on. I don’t necessarily want to engage in
a full Lean Six Sigma deployment right now. And you can do that. And it can be very, very
successful.