Six Sigma Green Belt experience
by Wanda Phillips, Senior Member, Canada West Coast and Puget Sound chapters and QPI SIG
I’ve been working on my Six Sigma Green Belt for a year now. The training is through my employer, Philips (Ultrasound and Monitoring), and my manager selected the project. It turns out to be a huge project with the potential for incredible savings and increased reliability. As a Green Belt, I’m expected to also keep up with my writing workload.
The process involved identifying the problem (using the voice of the customer) and then the underlying or root cause of the problem. In this case, my manager wants to control the costs of supporting the configuration management requirements. Given we manufacture ultrasound systems, we have to integrate our content into the BOMs (Bill of Materials) for each ultrasound system. There were a great number of steps and a great deal of variation in how people responsible handled the steps. Although there were SOPs in place, the company is comprised of two separate companies whose processes are being harmonized to put in place best practices. We have, now, a situation where our CMS workflows are our SOPs.
Unfortunately, not everyone agreed on what was a best practice, so part of my role was to use statistics to show where the problems where and where the improvements could actually be implemented.
It took a tremendous amount of effort to get buy-in from the participants. Each participant made a point of proclaiming their solution best both in meetings and privately to me. Everyone claimed to know what the problem was and how to fix it. Running this first part of the process stretched my abilities. It took me several months to convince all the participants to participate by contributing accurate data to the metrics (what the steps are and how long it takes to complete them).
In the end, we identified a process that contained 47 distinct tasks, 40 of which could, potentially, be handled via automation.
Once I had accurate data, I could move forward on evaluating the process. One thing that came out of this is that we have a “Cadillac” of a Content Management System and we are severely under-utilizing it. Once I worked out what activities the CMS could automate, I wrote specifications for those automation scripts and the updated workflows to integrate those. Right now, I’m trying to write those scripts, but my programming skills are not up to the challenge. So, I’m taking classes to raise my skill level. I hope to complete my Green Belt before my visa expires!
Once I’ve gotten the programs written, I’ll test the updated workflows, run a couple of pilot projects, capture the metrics for the new process, and write up the hand-off (to ensure the group understands the changes and can maintain the system).
Wanda Phillips is a Senior Technical Writer, Philips Ultrasound and Monitoring. Wanda says “Nearly 20 years later and I’m still (mentally) thanking my instructor from college. I’ve been writing user documentation, collaborating with designers and developers, and generally trying to make technology actually work for people. Currently, I spend my days trying to figure out the math for statistical analysis, identify various parts of my body in ultrasound scans, and fit content written in a half dozen styles by as many writers over as many years into a single, coherent document structure that can be stored as reuseable objects in Documentum.”
November 14th, 2007 at 4:07 am
Wanda, this sounds all to familiar. I enjoyed reading your blog and have faced very much the same battles….good to know I am not alone. I too had several areas where processes were poorly designed and somewhat thrown together over time and I ended up inheriting a mess. After cataloging these processes and evaluating them I found that almost 40% contained redundancies and a high cost of maintenance due to inefficiencies, ~25% of core business applications were under utilized, and operating costs were out of control. Over the past 6 months much of this has been addressed but not without driving this program with support from key management. You stated that it took a tremendous amount of work to get buy-in. Besides using statistical data, were there any other approaches you took to get the team aligned in the right directions? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.