The Quality Toolbox: Problem Solving Tools

Brainstorming: Brainstorming is a Phase I problem solving tool that is used to generate as many ideas as possible related to a given problem, with an emphasis on sheer quantity of ideas. Creative thinking should be encouraged during brainstorming, with no judgment or evaluation of ideas taking place during this activity. The goal is to identify as many potential causes of a problem as possible, even if some of these causes seem to be so off the wall that they couldn’t possibly apply. While the “crazy” ideas may not be feasible, they often foster a creative environment which stimulates valid ideas that otherwise may not have been considered.

BrainstormingThis environment should encourage critical thinking of a problem or process to gain a comprehensive perspective of causes, solutions, and potential consequences. The brainstorming team should include not only members intimately involved with the process, but also representatives from internal customers on either end of the subject process. This team activity is best done on a white board or flip chart, requiring one person to fill the role of scribe and document all of the ideas that are generated by the team. There are a number of rules that should be followed to facilitate a successful brainstorming session, as shown in the adjacent Figure.

Cause & Effect Diagram: A cause & effect diagram is a Phase II problem solving tool with the purpose of analyzing relationships between a problem and its causes. The cause & effect diagram is also known as a fishbone diagram (for obvious reasons), or an Ishikawa diagram, named after its inventor Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa. During this activity, all the ideas generated during the brainstorming session are evaluated and categorized as they relate to the subject problem. At this point many of the ideas generated during brainstorming may be eliminated, while new ones may be added. The category names can be changed to fit the problem, but common categories are Methods, Machines, Environment, People, and Materials.

 

 

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Quality Toolbox: Data Collection and Analysis Tools

Customer Benchmark Survey: You might be wondering why the customer benchmark survey has to do with quality tools, to which I would argue that a quality system can only be effective after both measuring and understanding your customers’ needs, wants, and expectations. The KISS Principle (Keep It Simple Steve) most certainly applies to surveys; when designing the survey it is of paramount importance to base the questions on actionable strategies and make it a quick, painless process for your customers. With today’s technology, a Web-based survey can be completed by a customer in 3 minutes without having to leave their desk, and is the preferable medium for ease of use, demographic data capturing, and automated scoring/reporting.

Check Sheet: An easily created, simple tool that can be adapted for a wide variety of purposes, the check sheet is a process-specific prepared form for collecting and analyzing data. Check sheets are typically kept at the applicable process or machine, and contains information on process data collected, validation of activities completed, and/or tracks patterns or trends.XBarRChart

Control Charts: Control charts are a graphical representation of the current state of a process, and should be implemented at the operator level to maximize effectiveness. A control chart’s true function is to provide real-time feedback to control and improve a process, which means that the data displayed on the charts must help front-line operators make better process decisions.

Scatter diagram: A diagram that graphs pairs of numerical data against one variable on each axis that is used for analyzing relationships and trends between two variables. If the variables are correlated, the points will fall along a trend line or curve, and the higher the correlation, the tighter the data points around the trend line.

Stratification: This tool is not widely used or understood, and is generally used in conjunction with other techniques. Stratification separates data gathered from a variety of sources so that patterns can be seen, and is particularly useful when data from a variety of sources or categories have been lumped together and the meaning of the data can be impossible to see. This technique separates the data so that patterns can be seen. When using this technique, a couple of rules need to be followed:

  1. The strata must be mutually exclusive (every element in the population must be assigned to only one stratum) and
  2. The strata should also be collectively exhaustive (no population element can be excluded).

 

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Quality Toolbox: Process Analysis Tools – Poka-Yoke

Poka-Yoke: Poka-yoke is the Japanese word for mistake-proofing, (for us ancients, the pre-politically correct term was idiot-proofing), and is not a new concept; some variation of this method has existed for as long as people have been producing products. Mistake-proofing, error-proofing, fool-proofing; whatever label that is attached to it, poka-yoke is any method that eliminates the possibility of doing something incorrectly.

PokaYokePoka-yoke is, in essence, designing out the error; or more specifically, the human error.
Common poka-yoke solutions include checklists, dowel and locating pins, fixtures, error & alarm detectors, limit or touch switches, etc. An example of an offset tooling poka-yoke solution is presented in the attached figure, which makes it impossible for an operator to physically place the product incorrectly on a machine for processing. A properly designed poka-yoke will catch the errors before manufacturing defective product virtually 100% of the time.

The three rules of poka-yoke are: 1) Don’t wait for the perfect poka-yoke, do it now! 2) If your poka-yoke idea has better than a 50% chance to succeed, do it! and 3) Do it now, improve it later!

 

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Quality Toolbox: Process Analysis Tools – Flowcharting

Process Flowcharting: Process flowcharting is the use of a diagram, or picture, to represent the major elements of a process in sequential order that is used to determine how the process is really operating. Process flowcharting, also called a process flow diagram or simply a flowchart, will define boundaries and constraints and is the first step in measuring the cFlowcharturrent process. Before a process can be improved, it must be understood, and process flowcharting is the right tool for the job. The first step in many process improvement projects is to flowchart the process as it currently exists, which may not have any resemblance to company standard operating procedures (SOP). The realization that their SOPs do not reflect how the operation is really running is generally an “Ah-Ha!” moment for the company. Although turning a process into a picture may sound very simple, it is an incredibly powerful tool to see what is really happening in a process.

A flowchart should be used when a team needs to: 1) Understand how a whole process works, 2) Identify the critical points, bottlenecks, or problem areas in a process, 3) See how the different steps in the process are related, or 4) Identify the “ideal” flow of a process. Developing a process flowchart is quite simple, and consists of gathering a group of people in a room that are involved in the process, arming them with a stack of Post-it® Notes, and holding a brainstorming session on how the process currently works. When the process flowchart is finalized, it should be formatted in a flowcharting software such as Microsoft® Visio and become part of the documentation system. After a flowcharting session, the people actually doing the job are always amazed at the difference between how they perceive the process and what is really going on. A common result is a spaghetti diagram that highlights excessive travel, motion and redundancy. A picture truly is worth a thousand words.

 

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The Quality Toolbox

Every year I get together with a group of my good friends, Bobby, Dudley, Doug and Woody, all fellow Harley-Davidson enthusiasts, and take an epic ride to “parts unknown”. As we were sitting around the campfire one night during this year’s trip, I mentioned that I was writing a new series of articles on quality and was struggling with what to include out of the wild-hogsvast number of quality tools available. Doug, who has his own handyman show as his day job, said “Steve, it is all about having the right tools in your toolbox for the job at hand.”

As is normally the case, my friend Doug had just condensed a complex problem down to a simple solution; develop a Quality Toolbox with only the most powerful tools that should be a day-to-day part of any quality professional’s arsenal. I have classified this toolbox into four categories: Process Analysis Tools, Data Collection & Analysis Tools, Problem-Solving Tools and Quality Planning Tools. While this toolbox is certainly not all-inclusive, the set of tools contained in this chapter will provide a blueprint that any organization can use to develop, implement, and maintain a world-class quality system that supports a continuous improvement culture.

Stay tuned… I will be drilling down into this toolbox over the following series of posts.

 

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Use a Critical Eye for Muda during your Gemba Walk

Muda

Muda is a Japanese word for “waste”, and don’t kid yourself into believing that your operation is so lean & mean there can’t be any significant waste going on. Waste comes in many forms; my definition of waste is simply “anything the customer is not willing to pay for’. Of course, hard wastes are easy to identify, scrap, rework, excess inventory, etc., but sometimes it’s the soft wastes that can undermine a business.

MudabuccilliquoteFor example, during a recent best practices assessment I spent a few hours just observing the customer service department of a small manufacturer. This particular client uses their customer service folks to take new customer orders, manage delivery reschedules and handle customer return authorizations/customer complaints. The major observation was that while the people were extremely competent, the tools they had been given were extremely poor. The company had not placed a high value on the computers that customer service was given and when an executive received the latest and greatest, their old equipment was handed down to them. When taking a new order over the phone, the operator would need to access three different screens to complete the transaction while delivery reschedules required about seven. Due to the outdated computers and software, accessing each screen took an average of 12 seconds each time to load; all while the customer was waiting on the phone.

While 12 seconds may not sound like much, a quick upgrade in equipment resulted in the client saving about 1 ½ hour per week for each of their two customer service people. The collateral benefit was the reduced wait time & frustration customers experienced during the busy time of day when customers could not get through and speak with someone live the first time because they were helping other customers.

Muda is everywhere; it is the small victories that add up to big savings!

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Evaluate Training during your Gemba Walk

Tales from the Road

A typical scenario for me is to be walking through a manufacturing facility and stopping at a work center manned by a highly-skilled operator. The management escort is quick to say “Stanley here is our department lead, and one of our most experienced drill operators.” When asked to see Stanley’s training records, the manager states “Stanley is our trainer, and all new employees apprentice with him before becoming certified to run a drill.” When asked again to see Stanley’s training records, the manager says “Well, uh… Stanley was grandfathered in since he has been running this drill for 30 years; he certainly doesn’t need to be trained.”

In these cases, management just doesn’t “get it”; highly-skilled, experienced people like Stanley are the greatest asset to any company’s training program, and should be the foundation the program is built around. One of the greatest advantages of training in this situation is to capture the tribal knowledge of the highly-skilled workforce. What I mean by tribal knowledge is the entirety of people like Stanley’s expertise, experience, tricks of the trade, and the idiosyncrasies of the job that have been learned over the last 30 years that are probably not documented anywhere.

Preserving this tribal knowledge and turning it into a training competitive advantage is critical to a company’s long-term survival.

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The Gemba Walk

The gemba walk provides company leaders, managers and supervisors a simple, easy means of supporting overall continuous improvement while directly engaging with the folks responsible for the key business processes. The best approach to a gemba walk is to start at the last process and work upstream. Why? This will highlight how well your process is operating from a high level in terms of pull vs. push, bottlenecks, inventory and other production control issues. Depending on the level of personnel participating and/or the circumstances, gemba walks can be daily, weekly or monthly. Another suggestion is to focus on a different aspect (theme) for each gemba walk, one day might focus on 5S in the facility; another may be on WIP inventory, etc. It is important to limit the focus because if you look for everything you will accomplish nothing! Gemba

Ingraining regular gemba walks into the culture will consistently demonstrate to employee’s leadership commitment, alignment and support of the continuous improvement process. There are a couple of keys to a successful gemba walk, such as actively listening attentively, sharing what you learned during the gemba walk with the entire organization, discussing with department leaders conditions observed, and following up / monitoring the process where necessary.

What the Gemba Walk is Not

A gemba walk is not an opportunity to point fingers and find fault in employees while they are being observed. It is not punitive; employees will shut down and not openly engage at the first whiff of this. It is not a time to be the policy police; internal audits or other tools are appropriate for this. Finally, a gemba walk is not the time to solve; it is a time of observation, input and reflection. That does not mean disregarding operator ideas for improvements, but rather to “go and see” what is really happening. Any ideas or complaints should be noted and followed-up with after the walk. Be mindful not to “miss the forest because of the trees”!

Visual Management

I am a big fan of meaningful visual management everywhere possible to keep employees engaged, informed and foster a culture of ownership. You noticed I emphasized “meaningful” when talking about visual management; what I mean by this is avoiding at all costs a “wallpaper strategy” of posting walls of gratuitous charts, graphs, reports etc. simple to impress customers. The gemba walk provides a great opportunity to notice & question posted measures & charts and asking:

  • What is this chart telling me?
  • Who is responsible for updating them?
  • Do the employees look at the charts? How often?
  • What value do the charts have for employees?
  • Do customers ever look at the charts? Do suppliers?
  • Do you think the charts have an overall effect on operations?

The key to any process improvement is to question everything; not just accept the status quo. Whether you Manage By Walking Around, Gemba Walks, or some other method of going to where the work is done, the key is to get out of your office and “go and see”.

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Management By Walking Around & Gemba

Driving incremental improvement in your process is not something that can be done without intimate personal engagement; not just from the owners of the process, but also from the organization’s leadership. A hands-off approach by management will doom the effort before it begins.

Management By Walking Around

Tom Peters, author of the “Excellence” series of books and one of my favorite management visionaries, coined the phrase MBWA (Management By Walking Around). This is another of those concepts that seem so obvious, but how many of us actually do this? InsearchofexcellenceThis is a rhetorical question of course, but really, how often do we go out on the shop floor and just observe what is going on? I don’t mean tracking down orders and making sure people are working, but how does the facility look? Do the workers look happy? Are we working smart or overcompensating by working hard? What would I think if I were the customer? You can’t answer these questions sitting in your office!

Gemba

Mr. Peters was on to something with his MBWA, in fact the Japanese have a similar term for this; Gemba. Roughly translated as “the real place”, gemba means getting off your butt and going to see where the work is actually being done. Like many lean buzzwords such as kaizen, gemba has transitioned from obscure to ubiquitous across our industry. I love gemba, but like anything worthwhile, you get out of it what you put into it. Gemba demands a few things from the user to be successful.

First, it requires a deep curiosity to know what is really going on in your organization. Not what you think is going on, or what you heard is going on, but what is actually going on. Gemba next demands a skill set that includes the ability to actively observe and understand the work that’s being done. While this may seem obvious, doing a “drive by” surface observation won’t accomplish anything, and may actually do some damage by providing a false sense of process well-being. The last demand is perhaps the most important; an inherent respect for the people actually doing the work. These are your process experts that have the practical experience and tribal knowledge of the process. Gemba walks needs to be approached from a place of mutual respect and overriding desire to make things better, faster, cheaper, easier, etc. Gemba means going to where the work is being done and engaging the people directly, not assuming you have solved all the problems from your office.

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U.S. Appeals Court ruled that Conflict Minerals Rule Violates 1st Amendment

Forwarded with permission SW

August 19, 2015: Barbara Jorgensen – ElectronicsPurchasingStrategies.

A U.S. appeals court ruled this week that the government cannot compel companies to report whether or not their products contain so-called “conflict minerals”—gold, tantalum, tin, and tungsten—mined from regions in Africa. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled on Monday that the requirement that companies state whether their products are “DRC conflict free” or not conflict free violates the First Amendment, according to ECIA. The three-judge panel by a 2-1 vote stated that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) requirement to label products as “conflict free” or not is hardly factual and non-ideological. Instead, the compelled disclosure ethically taints products and stigmatizes companies in violation of the First Amendment.

The suit was brought by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable in 2012. The U.S. Dodd-Frank conflict minerals rule requires publicly traded U.S. companies to disclose whether their products contain certain metals and whether these metals originate from rebel-held mines which are funding armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The measure is intended to discourage companies from sourcing these materials from regions in which human rights are routinely violated. In a statement released on Tuesday, the NAM said: “We believe it is unreasonable to require companies to continue to spend substantial resources implementing the SEC’s rule when its central feature has been invalidated on constitutional grounds. Therefore, we believe the SEC and Congress should reexamine this approach of the Dodd-Frank Act and rule in light of the court’s decision. The SEC had estimated initial compliance costs of $3 billion to $4 billion in the U.S.; electronics industry estimates were higher.

Fewer than 20 percent of issuers filed conflict minerals compliance documents in 2014 to the SEC. One of them was capacitor manufacturer Kemet Corp. which uses tantalum in its products. The ruling comes amidst the development of a similar rule in the European Union. The EU’s proposed conflict-minerals legislation is likely to cast a much wider net than Dodd-Frank. Not only may the EU requirement add elements to the list-such as cobalt-but it may encompass any country or region that is perceived to be violating human rights. “The European conflict minerals regulation is aligned in many ways with the U.S. regulation but actually extends the geographic scope to consider all areas of conflict and high risk where conflict minerals are sourced,” said Scott Wilson, content solution strategist for the Electronics & Media Group at IHS, a panelist on the IHS/iPoint webinar “Conflict Minerals Compliance: Mistakes, Lessons Learned & Best Practices.” “It no longer pays special attention just to the DRC.” That’s not the only adjustment the EU may make: instead of a voluntary self-certification program for conflict minerals disclosure, the EU may mandate measures such as third-party audits, he said.

In May members of the European Parliament requested mandatory certification for EU importers of conflict minerals to ensure they do not fuel conflict and human rights abuses. Their position includes compulsory independent and third-party audits of smelters and refiners to check due diligence. Members further proposed that the 880,000 downstream European companies that use conflict minerals in manufacturing consumer products provide information on the steps they take to identify and address conflict mineral risk in their supply chains. The Dodd-Frank Act has reverberated throughout the electronics supply chain and has prompted many companies to push data requirements on to their partners.

It’s become abundantly clear, said Jared Connors, technical sales manager for material compliance, sustainability and conflict minerals for iPoint, that the compliance process is impacting companies that don’t have to file with the SEC. “The information [regarding conflict minerals] comes from the supply chain, yet the majority of supply chain companies have no direct connection to the law and therefore have no obligation the be familiar with the requirements.” A lot of disparate data ends up with the filers, he said. “This is an annual audit you have to do each year-and you have to show improvement year after year. In 2015 you are going to have to demonstrate you know more about your sources than you did in 2014.” The distribution channel in particular is a concern for some filers. As distributors do not manufacture the components they sell, many refer OEM customers to data their suppliers have filed or have provided online. “This represents a misalignment between the physical supply chain and the information chain,” said Wilson. “The regulation really addresses suppliers, but in the case of electronics in particular, distributors are selling products on behalf of [original component manufacturers] and don’t collect [conflict minerals] information. Distributors may not have a system to address specific questions and they have to pass those on to the OCM.” The government has 90 days to appeal to the Supreme Court, or it may petition for rehearing before the entire set of judges in the D.C. Circuit.

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