HOW MANY PEOPLE WILL DIE IN THE UK FROM CORONAVIRUS?

Firstly, this article is my own view and not representative of SigmaPro as a whole. Secondly it is not intended in any way to trivialise the fact that so far, over 66,000 people have lost their lives as a result of Coronavirus across the World. To lose a loved one under any circumstances is a terrible thing, especially when one feels that it could have been prevented, and our thoughts and prayers go out to anyone that has been affected directly or indirectly by coronavirus.

In a previous blog, I have covered process stability, which is the first part of assessing the current (or baseline) performance of the process, typically involving control charts. The biggest mistake people make when examining process stability using control charts is to confuse control limits and specification limits. Specification limits have nothing to do with statistical control, and control limits have nothing to do with specification limits!

The measure that relates process performance to specification is process capability.

The first phase of the Control stage in DMAIC is to develop a control plan. A control plan is a document that records how all significant process characteristics will be kept in line with the defined requirements. Before a control plan can be developed however, the improvement leader will need to consider what could go wrong with the process, as the controls need to be designed to detect this.

In this article we will look at a technique called FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, and how it can be used to identify and reduce risk. Although an FMEA is typically used in the Control phase, it can also be used in Improve, or indeed in any phase where a structured approach to risk identification is required.

In a previous article we concluded that implementing strategy means changing the organisation, so any structured improvement approach that works involves changing the organisation. We also concluded that if we recognise that improvement requires change, and we want to achieve sustainable, ongoing improvement, then we cannot purely consider change as a process with a start and end point, we need to consider change as a cycle.

This article will consider the importance of linking improvement approach to organisation strategy and propose a four step cyclical approach to ongoing change to make it a part of sustainable improvement.

If you are thinking of introducing Lean, Six Sigma or for that matter any other kind of sustainable improvement approach into your organisation, you will need to consider how you manage change. You will also need to consider how the proposed changes will support organisation strategy – and if you are thinking “there is no need to consider how it supports strategy, that’s something separate” then sorry that’s wrong thinking!”

Both Lean and Six Sigma originated as strategic enablers. Lean originated with Taiichi Ohno in Toyota, Toyota’s need was to be able to compete with the American automobile industry, which was dominating globally in the 1950’s using volume production. The Japanese strategy was to compete by offering different models with different options, but this required a change in manufacturing capability, to be able to produce faster, with lower stock and higher variety.