Changing the operation of a business to reduce waste, increase profitability, and gain efficiency is the goal of a new service being offered to PolymerOhio members. This kind of dramatic change is the result of Lean Six Sigma strategies that have a proven track record for enabling business improvement in four months. Through Lean Six Sigma management coaching, quality management systems consulting, and supplier development counseling, a very diverse group of companies has implemented Lean Six Sigma to improve the bottom line.
In the majority of cases, Lean Six Sigma strategy consultants can complete strategic projects quicker and cheaper than a company’s internal resources, which are usually too busy working on tactical or day-to-day activities to realize long-term improvement critical to their customers or gaining new market share. As companies succeed in reducing waste, they reduce variation and generally improve their processes.
“For smaller companies, we might help set up processes with Design for Six Sigma,” says this PolymerOhio PASS Program supplier. “Much of this is aimed at preventing problems. For example, with a medical device company, we started with a needs assessment because this company was strong on innovation and entrepreneurship, but not strong on the operations side.” He helped the company set up a quality management system to both support its growth and meet its customers very high quality and delivery requirements. Upon completing the project, the company passed an audit from their customer for the first time and can now sell into the Medical Device market. For larger companies, their needs might include training their manufacturing engineers in implementing the Lean Six Sigma methodologies or providing resources to address very specific objectives.
Typically, small companies rely on the expertise of their people, and it can be devastating when a key person leaves. But if you document what people do and what the processes are, a company can survive the departure of a principal person. Further, if you operate your company in anticipation of your customers’ requirements, you get ahead of the dangerous curve of using the customer’s request as the impetus to do something – and it might already be too late to try to change your way of doing business to respond to their needs.
A Lean Six Sigma consultant can coach and train people on how to use a decidedly hands-on approach that is rich in templates, standardization of business activities, and process consistency. This helps companies grow to the next levels of their potential, and that includes a healthy amount of attention to their infrastructures and operations. If a company is trying to get certified, such as the medical device company for ISO 13485, it can be accomplished within one year.
In another example, for a manufacturing company, its biggest issue was waste that resulted from a complex machine. For this company, a Lean Six Sigma Coach first worked with company representatives to define the existing conditions and business case. An improvement tool called “Design of Experiments” was selected to measure the variables and solve this problem of multiple factors and interaction effects of different machine settings. Experiments/different settings were set up and data collected. Software analysis predicted a route to improvement and machines were reset to the optimized settings. The final control phase measured the improvement (over 70 percent reduction of waste in this example), and a control plan was set up to lock in the optimization and continue to sustain the improvement.
Important to the Lean Six Sigma approach is its very strategic thinking and tactical behavior. The company being impacted can still operate while the improvement process is developed and put into place. Most companies know what to do; they just don’t know how to do it. This PASS program vendor’s goal is to provide a mechanism for process improvement to not only help a company grow, but to provide a return on investment of 5 to 10 times in less than a year.
For more information on the PolymerOhio PASS Program, contact Ron Shankman at
614.776.5720.
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PolymerOhio, Inc. is a polymer industry-specific Ohio Edison Technology Center, which is funded by the Ohio Department of Development. PolymerOhio focuses on enhancing the global competitiveness of the polymer industry, including companies from the plastics, rubber, bioproducts, and advanced materials segments. For more information, polymerohio.org
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