Products

Key Functionality & Technical Papers

Lean Six Sigma

1. What is Six Sigma?

In today's business world this has more meaning than just a failure rate. It is a methodology that is being adopted by enterprises to increase their profitability through improving the Sigma capability of their business processes. In essence, Six Sigma means overall excellence, not only in the finished product, but also in the administrative, service, and the business processes throughout the whole organization.

"Six Sigma" (taken from a letter in the Greek alphabet) literally means a failure rate of 3.4 per million.

2. The Methodology

The Six Sigma methodology is a structured approach. It consists of five core phases namely Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC) that allow companies to make exceptional bottom-line improvements.

2.1 Define: The Define phase is a thorough assessment of the current business environment. This primarily includes understating an organization's strategic and operational objectives. In detail this phase entails understanding the customer and their needs, developing a charter, identifying key metrics, etc.
2.2 Measure: The Measure phase includes a review of the types of measurement systems and their key features, as well as the frequency with which defects occur and the process capability, which governs the creation of defects. Establishing valid and reliable metrics to help monitor progress towards the enterprise goal is also a key part of the measure phase. Exploratory and descriptive data analysis techniques are used to help understand this data. At the top level the goals will be the strategic objectives of the organization, such as a higher ROI or market share. At the operations level, a goal might be to increase the throughput of a production department. At the project level goals might be to reduce the defect level and increase throughput.
2.3 Analyze: The Analyze phase uses specific statistical methods and tools to isolate key pieces of information, which are critical to the number of defective products. In this phase, practical business problems are turned into statistical problems. The system is analyzed to identify ways to eliminate the gap between the current performance of the system or process and the desired goal.
2.4 Improvement: The Improve phase focuses on discovering the key variables, which cause the problem. The key is to improve the existing system. This can be achieved by finding new ways to do things better, cheaper, or faster. Project management and other planning and management tools are used to implement the new approach. Statistical methods are used to validate the improvement.
2.5 Control: The Control phase ensures that the same problems don't reoccur by continually monitoring the processes that create the product or service. Modifying compensation and incentive systems, policies, procedures, MRP, budgets, operating instructions and other management systems, may institutionalize the improved system.

3. Discrete Event Simulation with SIMPROCESS

Design of Experiments (DOE) - a statistical approach, determines the number of experiments to conduct in order to gather the optimal level of process performance data that then can be used to identify variables and variable relationships that exert the greatest influence on system characteristics.

Many organizations are finding that they are limited in their ability to conduct the required experiments. Conducting tests in the field could:

Result in costly manufacturing line downtime
Result in excessive scrap
Result in measurements not taken often enough for valid analysis
Result in costly resource downtime
Result in testing a flawed hypotheses which translates to a wasted effort
Mean conducting fewer than the optimal number of tests
Be too time consuming

However, SIMPROCESS is a tool for creating system models and executing them as discrete-event simulations. Discrete-event simulation models represent systems from an object-oriented perspective, i.e., the modeler can focus on defining and interconnecting system components and let the tool resolve the complexities of inter-component behavior. This capability facilitates modeling of very complex systems where analytical modeling techniques would be unrealistic.

SIMPROCESS provides a detailed view of the system design and facilitates identification of scenarios where the system may "lock-up." SIMPROCESS models can have a highly detailed representation of system design and logic. The SIMPROCESS model can assess the performance of system designs under realistic loading conditions to determine if design flaws surface under increased event rates and volumes.

4. SIMPROCESS Augments Six Sigma

The use of SIMPROCESS augments and strengthens a phase-by-phase Six Sigma implementation. Overall benefits include reduced experimentation duration and costs through simulation, reduced costly field implementations of incorrect solution through solution validation, and reduced measurement time with an easy-to-use tool.

4.1 Define