Tag: six sigma

OM in the News: Lean Experiences at the University of Dayton

daytonOM tactics to improve efficiency and work quality with roots on shop floors and assembly lines are paying dividends on the business side of serving students, writes the University of Dayton News (Dec.16, 2013). For example, using Lean Six Sigma activities, the bookstore reduced the number of new textbook returns by 5%, freeing staff to focus more on customers. Dining services consolidated salad prep and now is able to serve more locations. Other areas around campus have saved on printing costs by using reusable printer cartridges and consolidating printers and copiers. “Our students are at the heart of what we do. We want to relentlessly focus on improving their experiences,” says UD’s Finance VP.

“Lean Six Sigma is a never-ending process of improvement activities within an organization,” adds the director of UD’s School of Engineering’s Center for Competitive Change. “Through Lean Six Sigma activities, organizations adopt a philosophy of engaging employees and using data to solve problems. The entire focus is on customers. This can be used in our business operations.” There are more areas for improvement, he points out. “For example, how can we make better use of our time? Can we cut down on the number of forms we can use for hiring? Do we need 18 local access networks for computers systems? If we can use 2 people for a job, instead of 4, how do we better use the other 2 to be more productive in another area?”

The University rolled out the initiative in the bookstore, dining services and facilities management in July. It hopes to expand into 40 areas this semester and to reach a total of 200, with UD students working with each area. Through the projects and completion of the UD’s Six Sigma green belt class, they will earn their industry Six Sigma certification. The overall goal is a 10% improvement in the quality of delivering products and services to students.

Examples of lean in academic settings are not common, and this is one worth sharing with your students.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. What ideas do you have for improving processes on your campus?

2. Why aren’t lean concepts more widely applied on campus?

OM in the News: Health Care Kaizens

Now, more than ever, hospitals are being expected to do more with less.  That’s where lean methodologies come in, says Healthcare Technologies Online (May 2, 2012).   Lean methodologies, as we discuss in Chapter 16, are geared toward continuous process improvement, and there are two predominant lean schools of thought — Six Sigma and Kaizen.   Each takes a slightly different approach to achieving this outcome. Six Sigma incorporates more statistical analysis than Kaizen, focusing on eliminating defects so that a final product is as close to perfection as possible. Kaizen looks to improve all aspects of a business by standardizing processes and eliminating waste.

The Kaizen philosophy also strives to include every employee into the process improvement initiative.  Kaizen stresses that the real experts in any organization are the people who actually do the work each day, and these employees should be intimately involved in improving their own workflows. In healthcare, this could be a nurse in the emergency department, someone working in finance, a surgeon in the operating room, or an IT executive.

Each person has their own ideas for how their specific workflows could be more efficient. The idea of Kaizen is that a lot of little ideas evaluated and implemented at a local level can have a huge impact on an organization and can generally be implemented much more quickly and easily than a single million-dollar idea handed down from corporate. However, many employees don’t feel empowered to implement changes in their organizations, even if they are common sense solutions. Kaizen puts a structure in place that provides employees with this power.

Kaizen changes are often small, but when instituted in masse they can make a huge difference. For example,  Franciscan St. Francis Health of Indianapolis  estimates that its facility implemented nearly 4,000 Kaizen ideas last year that resulted in a multi-million dollar impact to the hospital’s bottom line.

Discussion questions:

1. Find and describe how another hospital has successfully implemented lean techniques.

2. Why don’t all hospitals embrace kaizen and six sigma tools?

Video Tip: Lean Six-Sigma at Franciscan St. Elizabeth Hospital

I just came across a wonderful 5-minute video about lean six-sigma that Mark Graban mentioned in his blog–one of my favorites– about Lean Hospitals (see our Links We Like on the right side). The video is narrated by Brian Hudson, a  researcher at Franciscan St. Elizabeth Hospital.  Hudson was trying to improve the time it takes to get a patient with chest pain from “door” (arrival at the hospital) to “balloon” (insertion of a tube to unblock a clogged artery) down  from 114 minutes to the national standard of 90 minutes. A faster “door to balloon ” time often is the difference between life and death for a heart attack patient.

A year after Hudson started his research in 2007, using lean 6-sigma, he had been able to get his hospital’s average to 74 minutes. In 2009, Hudson suffered a heart attack, watching the clock in the emergency room the whole time with the same mental checklist he had developed for doctors. If you don’t show this video in class, watch it yourself–it may save your life!