Six Sigma

First off I am pleased that you, Books-R-Us, is going to adapt to the Six Sigma process. Not only will things run smoother, the product better, but the end customer will also be happier. I am going to plan out the course for you below; if you need any additional help here is the master black belt who you will want to contact:

Now assuming that everyone has already read Six Sigma for Everyone by George Eckes, I’m not going to go into defining all of the technical terms; he does a fine job of doing that in his book.

Business Case: We are going to revamp out assembly line project to run both effectively and efficiently. The assembly line is the core of the business, and if it isn’t running both effectively and efficiently, we are losing

money.

Problem Statement: We have made no steps to improve our line, even though we have the demand for our books. We only have one employee, who by the way can’t keep up with the demand. We need to get to the point to where for every 1,000,000 books are sold madam customer only rejects 3 or 4. Now this would be easy to do if we were only putting out 5-6 books a day, but we also need to put out a great number of books.

Project Scope: Bottom line, like I have sated over and over, is improving our effectiveness and still maintain a level of being efficient. Easier said than done, right? Wrong, if we focus on where the bottlenecks are in the line, and focus on the areas that are causing the books to be rejected (I.E. the folding process) we can improve our system dramatically. We are not going to worry about the bottom line and net profit. That isn’t your job as assembly line workers; we will leave that up to the group of executives for Books R Us. We realize that in the beginning we may be losing

money because this is going to take time to turn things around. We only want to worry about the assembly line, that’s it.

Goals and Objectives: Right now at the current step of the process (with one employee), we are making 4 books per shift, but we are also having 4 books rejected. We are losing

money, obviously. We have the demand for our books, if we put our 1,000 books and madam customer rejected 0, we would sell 1,000 books. There is obviously the demand for the books. We just have to get to the point to where they are quality books. In the next four to six months in one shift I would like to see 6 books made with a maximum of 1 rejected.

Milestones: Because of the limited space and the small staff we are going to have, I feel we can get results faster than they did at GE. I would like to see the Define and Measure milestone done in 3 weeks, Analysis 3 weeks, and Improvement implemented over a 6 week journey. These are just guidelines; if we feel we need more