Every time I start out introducing improvement and process in a group, inevitably somebody ask about belts. I talk to them privately about personal development and what they really want which is to leave the organization and do something else. I liked how you shared. KPO grows internal management supply such as team leads. This is a lot to think about and timely for me in my role. Thank you again for sharing.

Working in healthcare I see it all the time and I am excited to develop people in a KPO and will present this to leadership over the next few weeks.

Thanks for posting.

Dr. Irani, thanks for your nice comments. I’m glad that you enjoyed my books. I agree with your comments that both six sigma and TPS have their roots in industrial engineering. In fact I could even agree if you just wanted to call them nothing but industrial engineering. But you seem to be coming at this from a very academic and traditional point of view where the IE department designs the processes from their ivory tower and then implements them on the shop floor. In essence you are doing something to the workers not with the workers.

I’m sure you would be shocked to learn that at Wiremold I got rid of the IE department and the ME department and just assigned those engineers to value stream teams out on the shop floor. We wanted them to get their hands dirty at least five times a day while helping to remove the waste from our processes. They loved it by the way. At the same time I was increasing our hiring of bright young IE’s and ME’s as we needed their training and brains to move to the next step. We found this worked best when they worked with our hourly associates and incorporated their ideas as they were the ones that knew where all the waste was. Mostly it was in our existing processes designed by our former IE department.

Here is an example for you to think about. A number of years ago the CEO of Milwaukee Electric Tools asked me to come help him. I ran a couple of kaizens for him. One of the first projects was the first cell that they had created on their own and had just started working the week before. They had taken four of their young IEs and put them to work for three or four months designing this new cell. They were very proud of it and I was surprised that they would allow it to the subject of a kaizen. Anyway, by the end of the week we had gotten reductions of 50% to 90% in just about everything, man power, space, inventory, through put time, walking distance, change over time, etc. The IEs were kind of blown away by this but to their credit they just said, “If I hadn’t been on this team I would never believe this was possible.” Now how could this happen? After all I was leading this team and I am not an IE I’m just a lowly businessman.
The key of course is we worked with the operators on the floor and made all the changes that they pointed out.

Don’t miss understand. I’m not knocking IEs at all. I always wanted more of them. But when we ran kaizen teams on the floor to design new processes half the team was hourly employees and usually they came up with the best ideas assisted by the IEs. Now sure, if you are designing a new petro chemical plant from scratch your hourly work force might not be that much help. Even so getting the IEs input from people who worked on the floor of the old plant could really help with the design.

Please don’t take this the wrong way I really enjoyed your input.

Tamera, I’m sorry if I offended you. If you learned lean and six sigma at the same time great. My comments were aimed at companies that just train six sigma, award black belts but then don’t employ that knowledge full time. Instead people just go back to their regular job and may get called on from time to time to lead an improvement effort. I think this is wasteful. If you put in the effort to learn lean and six sigma we should let you do it full time and it should eventually lead to promotions for you so you can spread the word and teach others. Congratulations on your black belt.

Scott, thanks for your input. I’m glad your training involved both lean and six sigma. I saw that happen with a lot of companies that started out with six sigma but eventually evolved to lean as the main approach because it was delivering better results. They didn’t really want to discredit six sigma so they just called it lean six sigma. Nothing wrong with that. What you do and what you call it can be totally different. You seem to have gotten the best of both worlds. I wasn’t trying to suggest in my post that it was an either or choice. Our main focus was on lean but we used six sigma a lot where it made sense.

Paul, thanks for your input. I learned a lot from your comments. I’m sorry you got the impression I was trying to drag six sigma through the mud. That was not the case as six sigma helped us solve a lot of difficult problems on our lean journey so I am a believer. I was just trying to say that using six sigma alone as your strategy or main problem solving tool is not as good an approach as lean. Years ago we had the entire management team of Allied Signal’s aerospace business come to visit us at Wiremold for a couple of days when they were just starting their lean journey. A few years later I ran into one of their senior people on an airplane. “How’s the lean implementation going?, I asked. He said well we were doing great until Bossidy arrived and started six sigma. Now we have lots of projects going on but little effect on the overall business as we are not looking at the whole process. I was impressed that he understood that. I’m not knocking Larry Bossidy by the way. During my second General Managers job at GE he was my ultimate boss and I always thought he was smarter than Jack Welch. At the same time I thought Jack’s embrace of six sigma was a big waste of time for GE and that if they had started lean instead they wouldn’t be the mess they are today.

Even so, I was glad to hear that Allied Signal/Honeywell eventually added lean and other approaches and were very successful. I would guess the Bossidy’s leadership also had a lot to do with it. I would call that a great lean story while you would say it was a six sigma success. Sometimes its just semantics. Just remember the point of my post was not to drag six sigma through the mud.

Martin, thanks for your comments. Of course you are right when it involves my example of problems with our screw machines not holding tolerance. Either lean or six sigma could have solved the problem although I think six sigma would have taken longer and may not have resulted in as permanent a solution as we got with lean. But what if there were no real problems just a bunch of built in waste in every process? Would six sigma be the right approach to create flow? To reduce set up time? To create visual control? To get all of our hourly associates involved in removing waste? I’m not opposed to six sigma at all. I just think it should not be used as your strategy or primary problem solving approach.

Luke, yikes! I think you are making a mountain out of a mole hill here, no offense. We never tried to examine the KPO like this. If we had we might have been able to talk ourselves right out of having one as you seem to be trying to do. We created the KPO to make sure we had on site lean experts that could run and follow up on kaizens everyday. We also wanted to broaden the number of people across our organization that had strong lean skills and experience. It was learn by doing for the KPO just like the entire rest of the company. No one expected them to be the second coming of Taiichi Ohno. Plus we had our outside Japanese consultants with us for one week every month to tackle tougher projects and train the KPO. People rotated in and out of the KPO one by one not like a single class so there was no problem with stability or the KPO’s internal culture. As for your question of wether senior leaders trusted the KPO’s ability to lead the lean journey that was never an issue as I expected the senior leaders to lead the lean transition and insisted that they each be on 5-6 full week kaizens each year. They had to learn by doing as well. The other key thing that you are missing is the half of the people on everyone of our kaizen teams were hourly associates who did the work in the area we were trying to improve. All the best ideas came from them. I’ll leave you with one last thought, I’m sure glad you never worked for me!