APPLYING LEAN SIX SIGMA IN MANUFACTURING

摘要

Every business model generally has the same end goal which is to ensure they have a satisfied client in all circumstances. Companies need to deliver products, parts or services to customers without interruption. Global concern over sustainability is causing companies to put additional emphasis on reducing consumption of resources and optimizing the process control. Why Six Sigma? Customers want to have defect free products at a competitive price! What is defect free in a process that has natural variation? Need to translate this into allowable variation of production processes. What is Six Sigma? Six Sigma emerged in 1987 when Motorola published their Six Sigma quality program. It is a metric that demonstrates quality levels at 99.997% performance for products, processes and services. Six Sigma is a vision and an approach in achieving the highest customer satisfaction through offering products, processes and services at the highest quality and at lowest costs. It is an integrated approach to process excellence. It is also a business concept in response to customers demand for high quality. Six Sigma demands competence in statistics to ensure decisions were based on facts. What is Lean Sigma? Lean Sigma is an evolutionary improvement to Six Sigma for transactional processes that is common e.g. in services but also in manufacturing. It develops a deep process understanding in terms of value flow dependencies and tries to improve efficiency in processes. Lean Six Sigma combines proven methods from best practices based on years of industry experience. Lean focuses on eliminating non-value added steps and activities in a process. Six Sigma focuses on removing variation from a process. Lean Six Sigma leverages a fundamental problem solving methodology that is common regardless of business unit or processes supported. Design for Six Sigma leverages a fundamental risk analysis/preventive methodology that is common regardless of business unit or product supported. This paper describes processes and tools to minimize exposure to failures. These systems integrate strategic corporate policies, operational management practices, and enabling tools. A vision for the future of this issue and how to drive continuous improvement in its management will be discuss.