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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Success of Lean Six Sigma


An article in Sunday's Democrat and Chronicle includes the success of MCC's Lean Six Sigma program. Conducted by the Office of Workforce Development, our program has saved area businesses more than $10 million. Here's the article:

Check, double-check and save big bucks
Lean Six Sigma program cuts waste, boosts quality and has already saved millions of dollars, local companies say

David Tyler
Staff writer

(March 11, 2007) — There are hundreds of "black belts" roaming the halls of Rochester-area businesses. Perhaps a few thousand "green belts" as well.

But they're not taking lessons from Mister Miyagi over lunch or breaking boards between meetings.

Instead, they are experts in a different kind of art: the rigorous discipline of Lean Six Sigma, a program that looks to cut waste and redundancy out of business processes. Adherents say it likely has saved area businesses, at minimum, hundreds of millions of dollars.

The methodology is a way of stepping back and examining problems that can get lost in the daily grind of doing a job, said Nancy Rees, a senior vice president for Corporate Lean Six Sigma at Xerox Corp.

"You don't even realize the waste and overhead and things that bog you down," Rees said.

Lean Six Sigma is actually a marriage of two disciplines, Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma. Lean Manufacturing seeks to improve speed and efficiency; Six Sigma seeks to improve overall quality. Together, proponents say, they're a more powerful force.

The term Six Sigma comes from the mathematical idea of a standard deviation and the process's goal of cutting defects to less than six standard deviations from the norm. In mathematical terms, that gets expressed as 3.4 defects per 1 million opportunities. The martial arts nomenclature — black belts, green belts — turned out to be a handy way to categorize the Six Sigma focus on cutting fat and waste.

Six Sigma got its start at Motorola Inc. in the mid-1980s. It slowly spread to other companies but began to catch fire when General Electric Co. adopted the process in 1995. GE estimates the program saved it $10 billion in five years.

Over time, Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing were merged by more and more companies.

"Both are focused on the customer and the value chain," said Carol Wilke, a black belt at Eastman Kodak Co. and vice chair of the Greater Rochester Quality Council, an arm of the Rochester Business Alliance that has promoted Lean Six Sigma.

Lean Six Sigma involves a lot of statistical measurement and analysis but can most easily be understood by its primary tool, known as the DMAIC method. Each letter of the acronym stands for a step in the process: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control.

At most companies, a black-belt or green-belt person or team will use those steps to tackle a specific problem. They define the problem, measure how the process currently works, analyze the process to find root causes, improve the process by developing a solution and then control it, or make sure the new process stays effective and doesn't allow old problems to creep back in.

The savings — by cutting time, paperwork, needless steps — can really start to pile up. And part of Lean Six Sigma involves rigorously tracking the savings.

Xerox, which threw itself into the program in 2003 after Chief Executive Anne Mulcahy had conversations about the benefits with GE, has worked on more than 3,000 Lean Six Sigma processes since adopting the program and has savings running into the hundreds of millions, said Rees.

Kodak's savings might be as much as $600 million, Wilke said.

Monroe Community College has been training a variety of clients — as diverse as Harris Corp.'s RF Communications division and the Monroe County Sheriff's Office — for three-plus years, and those entities have saved more than $10 million, said program director Chuck Caples.

Rochester Institute of Technology has a training program that's focused on smaller companies, and savings there have run into the millions, said program director Don Baker.

Take a couple of cases from Xerox. A black-belt team used Lean Six Sigma to identify problems in manufacturing a fuser module that's used in the flagship iGen3 digital press. The process saved Xerox more than $1 million.

The company also used Lean Six Sigma to analyze its patent filing process, where as many as 15 percent of patent applications were being abandoned and cycle times for all the approvals around a patent application had reached 400 days. The team was able to design a method that cut the abandonment rate in half, cut the cycle time to 167 days, and saved $400,000.

Bottom-line results such as these are clearly a big reason for Lean Six Sigma's popularity, said Rees.

Lean Six Sigma is no longer just a manufacturing discipline. Besides applying it to the patent process, Xerox has used it for sales and document consulting, and has even used the methodology with clients.

The Greater Rochester Quality Council runs an annual Rapid Cycle program that uses Lean Six Sigma practices to help nonprofit agencies. The program has benefitted more than 40 agencies in five years. The RBA and Quality Council are talking with area health care providers about using Lean Six Sigma, and the city of Rochester is getting into the act, too, with Xerox helping to examine process improvements at the police and fire departments in hiring practices and incident reports.

"Almost anything that you do is a process that produces an output," said Bob Shea, communications manager for Lean Six Sigma at Xerox, and as a result Lean Six Sigma concepts can be applied.

"You can be a one-person shop just figuring out how to save money and use some of the ideas," MCC's Caples said.

Paychex Inc. hired former Kodak black belt Leslie Henckler as manager of operational process flow improvement in August to spearhead Lean Six Sigma efforts in Paychex's human resource business, dealing with customer 401(k) plans, insurance plans and other needs.

Henckler said she came to Paychex and found a wealth of places to explore Lean Six Sigma methods.

"It's almost like a green field in back-office processing," she said. "There's just lots and lots of opportunity there."

Where other programs aimed at increasing quality or efficiency have faded, most Lean Six Sigma adherents think this one has staying power. Its focus on the measurable results makes it easy to sell to company leaders, they say.

For example, Xerox compiles results and notes from its projects into a database that other "belts" can access to gain ideas. And demonstrable cost savings have a lasting impact.

"Many times, top management perks up their ears and says this was valuable, this really helped us" when they can see a $250,000 or more savings on a project, said RIT's Baker.

<mailto:DTYLER@DemocratandChronicle.com>

Dianne E McConkey
Public Affairs
03/15/2007