VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [28]
“Yes, that’s true,” she agreed. “We all need to grow. And I’m excited about the year ahead. I really am.”
Wayne smiled, as if they had a tacit partnership. Then he craned his head outside the SUV window to peer past traffic, which was now moving faster.
“All right, finally, here we go,” said Wayne.
Just ahead, the orange barrels ceased and a sign announced the end of the construction zone; the westbound highway opened again to two lanes.
“Looks like we’re going to be late,” Amy said, glancing at her watch.
“That damn construction bottleneck,” Wayne muttered as he zoomed into the left lane. He put the pedal to the metal. “We’ll make up for lost time. Hope I don’t get a ticket.”
Meanwhile, at the Oakton plant, Murphy Maguire had called together all the plant-floor managers and was rehearsing the steps of the intricate dance that would allow production to proceed while Wayne Reese gave his presentation on Lean Six Sigma to employees who would assemble in the cafeteria. There would be two presentations so as to cover both day and evening turns, but to keep everything running would require some juggling.
“Where’s Richy?” Murphy called out. “Richy, when does Godzilla vent?”
“Two fifty-six,” said Richy.
“And we’ve got the next batch ready to go?”
“We’re covered and set.”
“And the next soak is how long?”
“Three hours and twenty-six minutes.”
“All right, the downtown folks will be gone by then,” said Murphy. “So, listen up, here are the groups who go to the first presentation …”
Less than an hour later, Wayne Reese was speaking to the first group of assembled plant workers, a wireless microphone clipped to his shirt, pacing slowly as he spoke to them. Behind him was a screen with computer-projected slides.
“What is this thing called Lean?” he asked rhetorically. “And what is Six Sigma? We often use the two names together as ‘Lean Six Sigma’ or by the initials, ‘LSS,’ but Lean and Six Sigma are two different things … two separate disciplines.
“Lean is a discipline for creating value for customers by way of products and services with minimum waste at optimal speed in perfect balance with market demand. And Six Sigma is a discipline for identifying and eliminating defects, errors, and anything quantifiable that is unwanted by customers. Those are the Winner definitions, the ones that I use. Really, though, Lean and Six Sigma are both about eliminating waste. Lean looks at eliminating waste throughout operations, in lots of different ways. Six Sigma reduces waste primarily by reducing variation and so improves quality. But they complement each other very well, and so we often pair the two and call them Lean Six Sigma.
“Today, I’m going to give you just a quick overview of Lean Six Sigma, because as a company, Hi-T Composites is beginning a very important journey to achieve LSS values in everything we do. And it’s a journey that never really ends. It is continuous improvement that strives for perfection – knowing that perfection will never fully be reached. LSS is a philosophy in many ways. And yet, all of its tools and projects are practical. Its methods are structured and disciplined.
“I’m going to tell you a little bit about something called DMAIC: Define … Measure … Analyze … Improve … Control – which is a five-step process for solving problems. Today and in the future you’ll be hearing about projects involving ‘Five-S,’ which is a method for reorganizing a workplace so that tools are within reach and equipment is well maintained. You’ll also be seeing and hearing about a lot of these …”
He changed the slide and brought up something that looked like a graph with a lot of variable lines.
“This is a control chart, one of the key tools used in Six Sigma. And you’ll be hearing about Lean projects to create ‘one-piece flow,’ and eliminate the traditional and wasteful batch-and-queue method. There will be projects for reducing scrap and for making processes mistake proof. And on and on. Those I’ve