6 Sigma and Lean Manufacturing

What is Six Sigma? Six Sigma is a highly disciplined process that helps organizations focus on developing and delivering near-perfect products and services. Why "Sigma"? The word is a statistical term that measures how far a given process deviates from perfection. The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many "defects" you have in a process, you can systematically figure out how to eliminate them and get as close to "zero defects" as possible.


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Lean Manufacturing Glossary

Build-To-Order Building and delivering a product based on a customer-specific order. Pull is an important concept of Build-To-Order. Contrast to Repetitive Manufacturing.

Chaku-Chaku (Load-Load) A method of conducting single-piece flow, where the operator proceeds form machine to machine, taking the part from one machine and loading it into the next.

EPE Interval (EPEI) Fundamental concept to lean manufacturing. The EPEI is the time it takes to run through every regular part produced in a process. Knowing the EPEI helps determine the manufacturing lot size and supermarket quantities for each part produced in a manufacturing process, as well as the number of kanban cards in the replenishment loop.

Heijunka (Production Smoothing) Keeping total manufacturing volume and mix as constant as possible. Synonymous with level load scheduling or production smoothing.

Hoshin Kanri = Policy Deployment The selection of goals, projects to achieve the goals, designation of people and resources for project completion and establishment of project metrics.

Jidoka (Autonomation) Stopping a line automatically when a defective part is detected. Exceptions handling in real time.

Kaikaku Radical Improvement, usually applied only once within a value stream.

Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) Continuous Improvement is striving for perfection by continually removing successive layers of Waste, as they are discovered. It is generally accepted that a complete transformation process from mass production to Lean Manufacturing takes years. Perfection is zero waste and progress can't be benchmarked against competitors' levels of waste, but requires striving for world-class performance.

Kanban A method of JIT production that uses standard containers or lot sizes with a single card attached to each. It is a Pull system in which work centers use a card to signal that they wish to withdraw parts from feeding operations or suppliers. The Japanese word kanban, loosely translated, means card, billboard or sign.

Muda (Waste) Any human activity which absorbs resources, but creates no real value in the eyes of the customers. Lean theory classifies waste into seven categories: overproduction, defects, unnecessary inventory, inappropriate processing, excessive transportation, waiting and unnecessary motion.

Nagara System A production system where seemingly unrelated tasks can be produced by the same operator simultaneously.

Pacemaker Any process point along a value stream that sets the pace for the entire stream.

Pitch The time needed in a production area to make one container of products. For example, if Takt Time equals 30 seconds and pack size is 20 pieces, pitch is 10 minutes.

Poka Yoke Commonly referred to as Error-Proofing or Mistake-Proofing. The aim of Poka Yoke is to design devices that prevent mistakes from becoming defects by giving the earliest possible warning to enable response to abnormalities. Poka Yoke devices sense abnormalities and take action only when an abnormality is identified.

Pull-based Manufacturing An essential part of any Build-To-Order strategy. Having set up the framework for Flow, the next step is to only produce what the customer needs. Pull means that no one upstream should produce goods or services until the customer downstream asks for it. Contrast this concept to Push.

Push-based Manufacturing The production of items required by a given schedule planned in advance. Push based manufacturing is typically associated with producing products to forecasted demand.

Repetitive Manufacturing Building the same product over and over again. Repetitive manufacturing can apply to building both customer-specific or uniform, generic products in long continuous production runs. Lean Manufacturing strategies and/or Push-based manufacturing methods can be employed.

Shusa The leader of the team whose job is to design and engineer a new product and it into production.

Six Sigma Six Sigma is a statistical term that equates to 3.4 defects per one million opportunities. Typical manufacturers operate at around three sigma, or 67,000 defects per million. Six Sigma can achieve dramatic improvement in business performance through a precise understanding of customer requirements and the elimination of defects from existing processes, products and services. Key tenets of Six Sigma: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. To fully embrace Six Sigma, an organization must work intimately with all internal disciplines in addition to external suppliers and customers.

Specify Value What does and does not create value is to be specified from the customer's perspective and not from the perspective of individual companies, functions and departments.

Supermarket In lean manufacturing terms, a supermarket is a tightly managed amount of inventory within the value stream to allow for a pull system. Supermarkets, often called inventory buffers, can contain either finished items or work-in-process. They are used to handle finished goods inventories being replenished from a continuous flow pacemaker process, between a continuous flow process and other manufacturing processes that are shared by other value streams and for incoming parts and material being pulled from supplier locations.

Supply Chain Execution (SCE) A business strategy to improve shareholder and customer value by optimizing the flow of products, services and related information from source to customer. Supply Chain Management encompasses the processes of creating and fulfilling the market's demand for goods and services and involves a trading partner community engaged in a common goal of satisfying the end customer.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) A business strategy to improve shareholder and customer value by optimizing the flow of products, services and related information from source to customer. Supply Chain Management encompasses the processes of creating and fulfilling the market's demand for goods and services and involves a trading partner community engaged in a common goal of satisfying the end customer.

Supply Chain Planning (SCP) A subset of Supply Chain Management, this is the process of coordinating assets to optimize the delivery of goods, services and information from supplier to customer, balancing supply and demand. A Supply Chain Planning suite overlays a transactional system to provide planning, what-if scenario analysis capabilities and real-time demand commitments.

Taiichi Ohno Born in 1912, he developed the Toyota Production System using the quintessence of Japanese reasoning. He was an excellent originator of new ideas in the industrial world with a unique management style. His Japanese production system made planning for the manufacture of automobiles the most modern process in the world.

Takt Time Takt time represents the customer demand rate and is used to synchronize the rate of production with the rate of sales. Numerically it is the daily production number required to meet orders in hand divided into the number of working hours in the day.

The Five S's Typically attributed to the Toyota Production System (TPS), the overriding idea behind the Five Ss is that there is "a place for everything and everything goes in its place." Every item that is used in a business process is clearly labeled and easily accessible. Discipline, simplicity, pride, standardization and repeatability as emphasized in the Five Ss are critical to the lean enterprise in general and flow implementations specifically.

Toyota Production System (TPS) The manufacturing strategy of Toyota, widely regarded as the first implementation of Lean Manufacturing.

Value Stream By locating the value creating processes next to one another and by processing one unit at a time, work flows smoothly from one step to another and finally to the customer. This chain of value-creating processes is called a value stream. A value stream is simply all the things done to create value for the customer.

Value Stream Mapping A Lean planning tool used to visualize the value stream of a process, department or organization