Beefing Up Lean Six Sigma
Written by Peter A. Buxbaum
England’s memo directed recipients to designate a liaison to the office, to establish work force training objectives in LSS methodologies, and to include continuous process improvement and LSS in individual employee performance objectives.
LeanSixSigma is a group of methodologies assuming that efficient business processes that comprise tow main branches. “Lean” is an outgrowth of Toyota's production system, focusing on increasing efficiency and reducing cycle time by eliminating waste. "Six Sigma" was developed by Motorola as an approach to improving quality by reducing production variations.
LSS concentrates on business processes, assuring that efficient processes flow easily and that wasteful activity disrupts flow, adds costs, reduces efficiency and impedes communication. LSS provides tools both for conducting quick process fixes—called "kaizen," from the Japanese word for improvement - as well as a more elaborate process for deeper analyis of problems and the development of solutions. The latter involves a procedure known as DMAIC, which stands for define, measure analyze, improve and control. (See sidebar.) LSS can and has been used to address both discrete, narrowly defined projects,+ usually with an emphasis on cost cutting, as well as to address strategic goals, which are usually not measured in dollars and cents. Although most military LSS projects have involved narrowly defined goals, the Pentagon is also learning from defense industry partners to apply LSS in a broader context.
HIGH-PROFILE PROCESSES
One prominent proponent of LSS in the military context is Rob Carey, chief information officer of the Department of the Navy, who has identified more than 20 projects for LSS treatment in the last year alone. Eight of those projects have already been completed, five are in the validation process, and nine are ongoing.
“We are currently working on several high-profile processes,” said Carey. “One involves certification and accreditation of systems, another involves the enterprise licensing of software.”
One of the completed projects was sparked when a Navy system experienced a privacy breach, which exposed weaknesses in the reporting process for those types of events. “The goal was to let everyone understand there is a consistent way to report the event,” Carey said. “We needed to stress the importance of the privacy of information and what to do when an event occurs.”
Carey measured the success of this project by the implementation of a consistent reporting policy across the department and by the increased visibility into cyber events that resulted. “Once everyone understood what to with the information, the number of reported incidents went up,” he said. “A single point of contact allows us better visibility and opportunity to take corrective action.”
The metric being used for the ongoing accreditation and certification project is the reduction of cycle time by 30 percent, Carey related. “The early indication is that this is possible. That is going to make a big difference in system efficiency and effectiveness because system owners will be able to get their systems approved for use on the network that much more quickly.”
One aspect of the project that has already been completed involves the approval process for installing software on the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet. The process has been reduced from 59 days to four days, Carey said, by reducing the number of handoffs involved in the certification process and the dwell time at each of the remaining steps.
An upcoming DON CIO project will involve streamlining cell phone acquisition management. “We are looking to institute enterprise telecommunications management,” said Carey. “We anticipate a tremendous benefit for the department from this undertaking.”
No matter the scope of the project, LSS is best applied to repeatable processes that generate data that can be analyzed and quantified. “Repeatable processes are much more prone to being improved by Lean Six Sigma,” said Bob Kamensky, an LSS “black belt” and leader of LSS efforts at the Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego, Calif. “Whenever you change a process you see a change in the data. Longer processes, such as annual budget submittals, may take two or three years to show a change, and then the impact may just be nibbling at the edges.”
Proficiency in the practice of LSS is measured at different levels and requires significant education and training. Black belts are the expert practitioners of LSS who have received years of training in the mathematical and statistical aspects of LSS methodologies.
Green belts are subject matter experts— the execution staff who work on specific projects and are adept at gathering data and strategies. White belts have taken a basic four-hour training program in LSS awareness. Other important players in the LSS process include champions—leaders who advocate LSS on a top-down basis—and sponsors, the management level personnel who decide to apply LSS to a particular project.
LSS is normally performed on processes that include a customer interface, according to Rusty Patterson, a vice president of Raytheon for Six Sigma excellence. Within the context of DoD process improvement, the customers are usually internal to the department.
Raytheon began to practice LSS in the late 1990s, after a series of mergers and acquisitions required the alignment of processes across its various components. “When we started with LSS, we used it for narrow fix-it projects such as factory floor issues that were easy to measure,” said Patterson. “We worked to make processes more efficient, with fewer handoffs and to take waste and variability out of the equation. Over time we started focusing on strategic objectives and growing the business. This involves positioning ourselves to get more business by anticipating customer needs instead of just responding to an RFP.”
A similar progression may in store for the Army, as it moves beyond cost-cutting measures and towards using LSS to help with a broad reorganization of its organizational structure.
FUTURE VISION
Patterson posited several attributes to a successful LSS project. One involves sponsorship by the organization’s top leadership so that it is aligned with strategic goals.
Another is that the project starts with a “to be” state—a vision of what the future process will look like, as opposed to shooting for incremental improvement. “You’re not looking to do something 30 percent better,” Patterson said. “You’re visualizing the future and locking onto that vision. This gives you the opportunity not only to improve what you’re doing but to come up with big ideas and apply solutions that were never thought of before.”
A third attribute is that the project is customer focused. “The project should focus on removing roadblocks to providing value to the customer,” Patterson said. Finally, LSS should be viewed as a roadmap for continuous process improvement.
“LSS provides hundreds of tools, and you won’t always have enough people to use them,” Patterson said. “The key is to open your aperture and to incorporate the tools you can into the methodology you are using to get to where you are going.”
At SPAWAR, LSS has been used to streamline the casualty reporting (casrep) process for C4I systems. “The casrep process we are installing runs through the myriad of wickets in our repair, maintenance, service and sustainment organizations,” explained Kamensky. “We used LSS to come up with a single system to used by the end customers in the fleet to make reporting more streamlined and rapid and without having these organizations stepping all over each other.”
The new process was generated by removing steps and redundancies in the process. “It was based on a root cause analysis of why the casrep responses were insufficient or late,” said Kamensky. “We mapped out the value stream to where redundancies and overlaps in the process occurred. We eliminated the three different entities that took reports on the same incident. None of these interrelated teams worked together before.”
The Army’s Office of the Surgeon General (OTSG) set out to fix a situation in which staff in-processing procedures averaged nearly three weeks, and sometimes lasted as long as 85 days. This inefficiency resulted in new OTSG staffers being late in assuming their duty assignments.
Lieutenant Colonel Rick Dickinson, chief of force management in OTSG Human Resources and a LSS green belt, identified the problem and helped find the solution by “looking at several of the processes to see where the holdups were,” he recalled. “We discovered that OTSG needed a simple, lockstep process that would significantly improve the situation.”
Dickinson first conducted a rapid improvement event to identify quick fixes. This resulted in the delivery of a detailed memorandum from the OTSG chief of staff, reiterating and clarifying the standards for in-processing procedures to the entire staff. Next, using the LSS DMAIC process, he developed a new in-processing plan that ultimately simplified the entire process.
In the end, the process was automated, allowing new employees to virtually check in to various in-processing work stations and employing one central OTSG computer to perform the work that many people in the past struggled to keep track of. As a result, OTSG’s in-processing costs for 2007 are projected at $167,000 less than the previous year, while cycle time dropped from 17 days to five days.
ROADBLOCK REMOVAL
LSS has also been used to accomplish strategic goals and not merely to solve narrow, discreet problems. These kinds of LSS projects often center around removing roadblocks to providing customer value, said Raytheon’s Rusty Patterson, and not merely on saving dollars and cents. These roadblocks are often addressed through the lean process by streamlining approval processes and reaction times.
In the case of problems surrounding the Air Force’s Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle, Raytheon, a subcontractor of Northrop Grumman on the project, applied LSS to bring the three parties together directly to solve delays in the spiral development of technologies.
“By working through the issues with Northrop Grumman and the Air Force, we were able to obtain an understanding of the problems and to remove constraints to providing value to the customer,” said Patterson. “We were able to institute a process to clarify who had the authority to make decisions and how to get approvals in a timely manner. We did this by mapping the decision-making processes and figuring out why contradictory decisions were being made.” The project also resulted in Raytheon winning additional Air Force business.
The Army is moving in the direction of using LSS to effect strategic change with the reorganization of its institutional structure under the leadership of Lieutenant General Ross Thompson III, military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army (acquisition, logistics and technology). “The operational force has clear command relationships,” Thompson noted, “while the organization of the institutional force is convoluted. We are in the process of reorganizing the non-warfighting elements of the Army to greater resemble warfighting organizations with a focus on mission.”
While LSS focuses on process rather than structure, Thompson anticipates that LSS will be brought to bear in his effort. “Lean Six Sigma is focused on the work that goes along with the structural changes,” he said. “You really can’t do one without the other. We anticipate a sea change in how the Army operates as the focus shifts to the needs of the customer. We have to have the right organization and processes to make that happen.” ♦
