A Successful Six Sigma Project
In my entire career so far, I
have implemented some highly valued projects – infrastructure, applications,
policies and procedures etc. Being a student of Six Sigma, it is highly
satisfying to be able to translate what you learn into an actual working solution.
You will be able to open your eyes and pick out things that need and can be
improvised.
Take for example the purchasing
approval process. A normal practise which involve manual , paper-based approval
from the requestor to the last authorised approver would face typical delays in
turnaround time and risk of documents being lost somewhere in transit.
Six Sigma involves 5 stages
called DMAIC where stands D for Define, M=Measure, A=Analyse, I=Improve and
C=Control
Step 1 - Define
the customers - Basically we need to find out who are the
people involved in the process, from the beginning to the end. Who will
initiate the purchase request, who will collect the quotes , who will approve,
who will monitor and own the process etc? When something goes wrong or
unnecessary delays incurred – who will be in charge to look into the issue?
Normally the person who is in charge in this case would be the purchasing
department and basically the customer.
Define the needs – In this case, we need to find a
way to reduce the turnaround time in getting
any procurement activities completed
Step 2 – Define the process - Work with the customer and do a
walkthrough of the process, use a flowchart and gather the documents involved.
Define how to measure defects - Since we already know the
process, we can therefore summarise the cause/s of defects and find out how to
measure the key metrics of the current state. In this case the answer is TIME which can be used to define the performance
of the procurement process.
Step 3 - Analyze the root cause/s of
the problem – which in
this case normally is the manual process and hardcopies being used in
circulation from one approver to another (sometimes they are located in
different locations). Several tools such as fishbone diagrams can be used,
where we can further discover more areas of concern such as :
- Absence of approvers in office
- Loss of hardcopies (and therefore more time
spent in recovering or restarting the process from the beginning)
- Time taken in delivery of documents within the
cycle
Step 4 i.e. Improve – meaning designing and executing
the steps needed to resolve the situation which is deployment of a
workflow-related application aka the product.
Step 5 – How to sustain the improvement
- Control
and monitor the results to ensure the objectives are consistently applied .
This can be easily accomplished via policy and guidance throughout the
organisation about the newly implemented procedures in procurement. We
need to identify the respective head of departments such as finance, IT etc in
order for them to enforce this new process. Communication need to be planned
and executed in order to ensure awareness and proper training (onsite and
remote) need to be conducted. As far as monitoring and measuring is concerned,
we can deploy, tweak and add the existing monitoring features to keep abreast
of procurement cycle performance for review purposes. One of the tools
that can be used is Minitab where we can use it for statistical analysis.
In summary - If these factors can be
incorporated in pre-deployment or sales pitch to potential customers, greater
growth in productivity can be accomplished without much hassle or questions as
the measurement of metrics themselves (before and after deployment) can speak
for themselves. Statistics play a huge part in measuring success of any
new deployment in any organisation…
