4.

Strategic Deployment
All quality improvement approaches can be presented nice looking after introduction and/or by not-mentioning the tedious work. So, it was wise that the organising committee of this conference concentrated heavily on deployment. In this chapter I have chosen some of the slides of the presentations on deployment (complete presentations in appendices 2-7) to highlight some of the aspects.

Difficult to change

Easy to change

Ability to change

From all these slides I have chosen the above picture to start with. Willingness and ability to change also follow a normal distribution. In the left tail we find persons who are against every change. In the right-tail we find people who see every change as an opportunity. Dont waste your time and energy on the unwilling people. Give your support to the pioneers and use the momentum created by the right-tail people to convince the middle people fact-based with examples from their own environment to overcome the not invented here syndrome. Concerning target-setting I like to pass on the advice: Never announce 5.5 Sigma as your target, because if they come and visit you and you have to admit you only reached 4.5 Sigma, you disappoint them. Better start with a target of 2.5 Sigma, reach 4.5 Sigma, because then you are great. The ever popping up item of Management Leadership and Support can be handled shortly: not just mention your support, but SHOW it.

4.1

CULTURE CHANGE
Six Sigma is 20% statistics and 80% culture and there you are in the uncomfortzone, because you have to tell people they are not doing well.

Explicit or implicit, in a lot of presentations the item Culture Change was mentioned. In the next slide four well-known stages of Quality Management are pictured:

Carlo Sassi, Whirlpool: you cannot skip steps in the implementation of Six Sigma in your company. Or (in my words) be aware of the stage of your Quality Management before and during Six Sigma implementation. Be aware that Culture Change is a long lasting process, so do not waste your time by planning too long and too much in detail, but start the learning journey. This learning will be two-fold: you and your organisation will learn the DOs sand DONTs of the primary Culture Change process, but you will also learn the DOs and DONTs of steering and simulating this process. Because you do not know yet these learning points, just start and open your mind for learning.

4.2

TIMING

The overview of the introduction schedule at Whirlpool Europe gives a good impression of the amount of time needed and the leadtime.

It took more than one year to get the first group of Black Belts certified and after that another ten months to certify the first Master Black Belt. At first sight it is quite remarkable that Procurement took initiative as well. But, Ford and Motorola have used Ford Q101 (Now QS9000) and Six Sigma quite heavily to reduce variance at their incoming parts by forcing their Suppliers to co-operate. For instance, Motorola trained in only one year 30,000 persons from their Suppliers in the principles of Six Sigma.

The trend, as sketched in several presentations, to start with Six Sigma in manufacturing, step over to Development (where a lot of failures are designed in nowadays) and even enlarge the improvement scope to Business Processes, is pictured in the slide above. This introduction and implementation route is chosen because in manufacturing easy success can be obtained with savings to avoid COPQ, i.e. Cost of Poor Quality. These results can be reached rather quickly and have a high visibility, the so-called lowhanging fruit. The phrase low hanging fruit was used quite often in the presentations; if the selection of the projects is not given enough attention, one of the pitfalls is that easy projects will be chosen in stead of projects that match more important criteria like COPQ. The next field to apply Six Sigma is development. However, this field has the disadvantage that the difference in approach is much more difficult to measure. The Six Sigma metric with the entity defects per million opportunities is a good aid in this field. However, the lecturers reported that this field was only entered after building confidence from the manufacturing projects. The same holds for applying the methodology on business processes, so the reported trend is quite understandable.

4.3

INFRASTRUCTURE/ARCHITECTURE

It is essential for a Six Sigma drive to start at the top and although this is not (yet) realized in all participating companies, it was very informative to see the different infrastructures. Most of them have champions at directors level, who are responsible to keep the whole action alive at that level and to address barriers (technical but most of all organisational) that can not be addressed by Black Belts (BBs) or Master Black Belts (MBBs). MBBs are installed to teach and mentor the BBs. At start this MBBs are experienced from earlier improvement drives, but later on they are trained BBs that

have grown to the level of MBBs. Green Belts (GBs) co-operate in the projects and bring in the much too often neglected knowledge and experience of the factory floor and/or development floor. The co-operation of BBs and GBs brings together the knowwhy and the know-how.
This entire structure of extra visible man capacity is a very positive point of the Six Sigma drives.

The above Whirlpool scheme is in fact the standard Six Sigma introduction scheme, as it is introduced at Philips Lighting as well.
s
Methods and Tools
Complexity

PC Systeme

Improvement suggestion scheme

Knowledge Management

Time days
Siemens AG 1999, All rights reserved

months Willi Kotte, October , 7th, 8th 1999

sixsigma_italien.ppt

The problem of integrating earlier drives into the new approach was illustrated with the two slides above.

4.4

TRAINING
Deming: If you think that training is expensive try ignorance.

All Six Sigma implementations presented, incorporate a lot of training (four weeks of theory with projects to apply the learned). As purpose of training was mentioned:
n n

learning tricks; transformation in thinking.

So, a combination of learning how to do an improvement project and understanding the back-grounds. The following slides give an impression of training hours and results:

Gilbert Hirtz, Champion Europe of Allied Signal, presented the complete Green Belt training:

As can be seen from the above slide the training can be seen as a general training in structured problem solving (see [2] for a comparison of six improvement methods).

Gilbert also presented the Lean Expert Training and Black Belt Training at Allied Signal.

In both expert training programs at Allied Signal cross-learning is taken care of in the fifth week. In this fifth week the BBs learn about Lean aspects and the Lean experts learn about the Six Sigma concepts.

4.5

RESULTS

All presentations of best cases ended with the subject Savings. All deployment presentations showed the overall savings.

The total result from the 142 completed projects at Whirlpool-Europe is: 24 billion lira (i.e. 12.48 million Euro). The average number op projects per BB has been slightly more than two. (see slide 8 in appendix 2 for more details). At Siemens thescore of their BBs has been:
n n n

1/3 bad; 1/3 one project/year; 1/3 two or more projects/year.

The overview of OPEX (the Six Sigma project at Whirlpool USA was called OPEX, Operation Excellence) launched June 1996:
n n n

9 Champion/Managerial classes (1 week duration); 18 BB training classes (4 month duration); 15 internal MBB candidates (classes 16 & 17 instructed completely with internal MBB).

Results:
n n n

Number of projects costed 688 Average savings per project $ 203000 TCP improvement 1994 1995 -1.1% 2.2% SIR improvement 2.4% 12.8%

1996 2.4% 3.8%

1997 2.8% 8.7%

1998 3.7% 8.8%

Bottom Line Impact

Direct BB-projects > DM 200.000 / project > Range from 20.000 to 3000 1997 appr. DM 10 1998 appr. DM 80 1999 appr. DM 120

Indirect projects (BBs involved) 1998 appr. DM 300 1999 appr. DM 1000

Steer on savings, i.e. reducing Cost of Poor Quality, and steer on number of projects per BB per year.

4.6

PROJECT SELECTION

In several presentations it was explicitly mentioned that project selection is the number one success factor. Several FMEA sessions held during Six Sigma implementation (with the drive itself as chosen subject to learn the key success factors) ranked the project selection for the BBs as the number one failure mode.

Projects should be selected before attendees are identified. Projects should be selected from each of the core areas of the business. Gilbert Hirtz, Champion Europe of Allied Signal, showed us next slide to illustrate the importance of project selection.

The previous slide gives a good overview of the method used at Allied Signal with a QFD-like matrix (left-hand-side of the slide) for setting priority to find the score for Importance. Combining the score for Importance with the score for Performance selects

the processes in the upper left hand corner of the Importance-Performance graph (righthand-side of the slide). Ole Johansson, Champion at Ericsson, told us that Ericsson is using Internal Business Assessments (IBA) for project selection. The assessment dialog is characterised in the next slide.

Do your BB project selection timely (every year for the next two years), visible (using well known criteria) and not too ambitious.