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Chemical engineer Aaron Spearin chats with Jeff and Adam, sharing insights on workflow balance, value stream mapping, and the importance of interdepartmental communication.
- Adam gets frequent complaints about traffic backups at this time of year, as many of his employer’s road construction projects are in full swing during the summer.
- Our guest for this episode is chemical engineer Aaron Spearin, a trainer and practitioner of Lean, Six Sigma, and Quality systems. Certified as a lead ISO 9001 auditor and a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Aaron has been practicing Lean Six Sigma since 2000.
- Aaron participated in the EUROTECH program at the University of Connecticut.
- Keen listeners may remember that this podcast previously discussed Six Sigma in Episode 42.
- Our guest says Six Sigma is a methodology, philosophy, and metric that has become an industry “buzzword.”
- Lean manufacturing was popularized in the best-selling book, “The Machine that Changed the World,” by Jim Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos.
- The seven Toyota wastes are transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, over-processing, over-production, and defects.
- ISO 9001 is a standard that, when met, ostensibly certifies an organization is meeting the needs of its customers and stakeholders.
- Takt time is the average interval for manufacturing each product unit if customer demand is to be met.
- Throughput time is mean interval for each product unit to pass through a manufacturing process.
- Gemba is a Japanese word for “the real place.” In lean manufacturing parlance, improvements come from going to the gemba, where the work is being done.
- Both Adam and Aaron are too young to realize that Jeff was serious when he mentioned Management by Wandering Around (MBWA).
- A repeatable pattern of activities designed to achieve an organizational objective can be deemed a workflow.
- An increasing level of work-in-process (WIP) serves as a good indicator of process imbalance.
- Eli Goldratt developed the Theory of Constraints, and authored a popular business book, titled “The Goal.”
- A value stream map attempts to track each state that a product might assume during a manufacturing process, and to analyze the level of customer value added between states.
- Aaron notes that 70% of Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing initiatives fail; this is rarely because of technical problems, but more frequently due to interpersonal and social issues.
- A Kaizen event is a company-wide (or department-wide) activity in which all employees gather together to improve a process.
- Netflix intentionally disrupts its network with a background service called Chaos Monkey to ensure the company’s software protocols are robust.
- Aaron co-hosts the E6S Methods Podcast with Jacob Curian, in which they discuss Six Sigma and Lean tools on a weekly basis.
- Listeners can reach Aaron via email: aaron -=+ at +=- e6s-methods.com. He can be also be reached on Twitter as @E6SIndustries, or on LinkedIn, and his website is at www.e6s-methods.com.
Thanks to David Evans for use of the image titled “Pontsticill Overflow.” Podcast theme music by Paul Stevenson.
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Guest Erica Lee Garcia explains the role of process improvement tools such as Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, and Statistical Process Control in this episode of The Engineering Commons podcast.
- Although process improvement tools are widely used in manufacturing, not all engineers are familiar with their usage.
- Our guest is Erica Lee Garcia, a Professional Engineer from Canada, who is also the owner and CEO of Erica Lee Consulting.
- One might have expected Erica to go into civil or mechanical engineering based on her childhood activities.
- Erica majored in Materials and Metallurgical Engineering at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
- Our guest started her career working for a firm that produced powdered metal products.
- In trying to determine why conveyer belts kept breaking in a sintering furnace, Erica got her first exposure to the continuous improvement process.
- Six sigma is all about getting rid of variation, while the lean method is all about getting rid of waste.
- Statistical process control (SPC) is a control scheme used for process analysis and monitoring.
- Kaizen refers to a philosophy focused on continuous process improvement. The term has recently come to mean a concentrated effort in dealing with a particular issue over a short period of time; such an activity may also be referred to as a “kaizen blitz” or “kaizen event.”
- Dr. Jeffrey Liker, a professor of industrial engineering from the University of Michigan, published The Toyota Way in 2003. The book details 14 principles that provide the framework for Toyota’s continual improvement system.
- The Kaizen Institute and the American Society for Quality are organizations that promote the continuous improvement of people, processes, and systems.
- Erica has run into situations where engineers and accountants have wildly differing interpretations of the same underlying data.
- Adam asks how projects can continue to improve after all the “low-hanging fruit” has already been gathered.
- Bruce Tuckman introduced the “Forming — Storming — Norming — Performing” model of group development in 1965.
- The phases of a Six Sigma project are “Define — Measure — Analyze — Improve — Control,” also known as DMAIC, for short.
- Erica addresses how one might deal with non-normal data while engaging in process improvement.
- Process variations are designated as resulting from “common” and “special” causes.
- Jeff notes that the 2007 financial crisis has been partially blamed on fat-tailed distributions that were distinctly different from assumed Gaussian probabilities.
- Erica mentions a video presentation by Dan Milstein talking about the 5 Whys, a tool used in process improvement to determine cause and effect relationships.
- Brian inquires about the minimum production volumes required to justify initiating a continuous improvement project.
- Jeff raises the notion that Six Sigma may kill innovation. That position is refuted by Erica, who notes that there is a method of Design for Six Sigma.
- While the United States celebrates National Engineering Week for seven days in February, the entire month of March is set aside as National Engineering Month in Canada.
- Our guest believes that aspiration messaging is more effective than descriptions of day-to-day duties when undertaking engineering outreach.
- The Changing the Conversation campaign, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering, is mentioned by Erica. She notes a video from the site, titled “If it weren’t hard, it wouldn’t be engineering.”
- Advice for early- and mid-career engineers is provided by Erica on her website, EngineerYourLife.net.
- Marc Garneau is a Candadian engineer, astronaut, and politician.
- Brian comments that engineering is a “world of niches,” in which engineers often have radically different duties and assignments, even if working in the same discipline, or for the same company.
- Erica can be found on Twitter as @engineeryrlife. She can also be contacted via her website.
Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the graph of a normal distribution probability density function. Podcast theme music provided by Paul Stevenson
Practical insights for the engineering crowd