One-day Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) Business Management System Strawman Creation to Share with Executives

Several who have attended Smarter Solutions’ Master Black Belt Lean Six Sigma training were undergoing a MBA program at the same time. These people have said that the Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) business management governance system should be taught in business schools.

IEE is a business management governance system that organizations can use to address the management problems of the day. The challenge is having the opportunity to describe IEE and its benefits to decision makers within an organization. The following one-day on-site session is a first step to address this need.

Many of our trainees have become in-house IEE system cheerleaders; however, they often can have problems navigating explanation of the system upward through the organizational chain of command. Earlier this week I worked with one of our in-company cheerleaders in describing to his manager how the IEE system could provide benefits to their enterprise. I will refer to our in-house cheerleader as George and his manager Sam. Sam, George, and I would work together during the day, calling in for data as needed.

We began the day with introductions. During this time, I learned that Sam had worked at several companies with their process improvement efforts. He highlighted the importance of getting management buy-in when undertaking improvement efforts; however, his previous companies did not always have as much of this support as he liked. Sam was receptive to looking how we might approach things differently in this company.

In this discussion, I learned how at one point in time the company spent much time on the creation and documentation of processes. They showed me a large picture of this work, which had no drill downs. They described how they went from much documentation of processes to little; i.e., like a pendulum swing. I also learned that previous Lean Six Sigma Black Belts were laid off in three recent downsizing, cost-cutting efforts. They wanted to learn from past experiences in going forward as they are now more in the middle of the described pendulum swing.

I then commented on how Lean Six Sigma and other process improvement programs are not a business system and they typically fail in time because of these efforts are not truly tied to business financial needs. Often process improvement efforts can become a hunt-for-project (with a silo view) program where even if some projects are satisfactorily completed the business system as a whole does not benefit from the process improvement work; e.g., the improvement was not in the organization’s constraint – perhaps sales/marketing instead of manufacturing.

I then used Bank of America as a example to further illustrate this point. A few years ago Bank of America might have been benchmarked for its Lean Six Sigma deployment. However, in recent years the company has had major problems and lay off all the Master Black Belts it hired to develop and manage their Lean Six Sigma program.

I then asked: what is wrong with this picture at Bank of America? One might ask. If Lean Six Sigma was doing such a great job, why did Bank of American have such problems? The answer is: Lean Six Sigma is not a business system. What is really needed is an enhanced (perhaps re-invented) business system so that the enterprise leads to the 3 Rs of business; i.e., everyone doing the Right things, and doing them Right, at the Right time. A business system with 3 Rs focus would lead to the avoidance of the types of problems that have been recently been experienced. The IEE system is a means to move toward 3Rs achievement.

I then pointed out to Sam that we need to determine today if you think IEE is a good fit for your organization. If at the end of the day you think that IEE is a good fit, one can use the tailored presentation of the business system that we will be roughing out today to explain the methodologies to others.

I then asked Sam what were his objectives for this session. He gave the following two objectives:

1. To have four people trained by Smarter Solutions to become IEE Black Belts. This people would work on various aspect of a large project that they thought would be beneficial to their organization.

2. To create a business management system

Sam then asked for a description of the IEE system.

Before beginning the IEE description I made the comment that we needed to show before the ending of the day how that this project aligned to the true needs of the business.

Sam agreed.

I used two poster charts to describe the IEE business system. These chart showed the details of the Enterprise process Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (E-DMAIC) system; i.e., the center portion of Figure 2 in
“Corporate Performance Management: The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System“. E-DMAIC is not to be confused with Lean Six Sigma project based DMAIC execution, which is referenced as Project DMAIC (P-DMAIC) in IEE.

These posters described highlights of executing the E-DMAIC system, as described in Volume II of The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System.

We then agreed to spend the rest of the day creating a straw man an E-DMAIC system foundation for their organization. This straw man could then be presented to others within their organization chain through a PowerPoint presentation.

We started with creating the high-level steps of their value chain, like that shown in Figure 3 of the above linked article. Also, a drill down was created for the high level step of the value chain where there project would be working, as an illustration of how processes could be tied together.

This value chain was then published in an HTML format so that others in the organization could be shown how they could later use this type of system to access processes by clicking through the value chain. This value chain could be a repository system for the processes that they previously created.

We then created the value-chain metrics for the value-chain function step that was where the project would be a part of. Goals for this project would need to improve these metrics. There needs to be an owner of this metric and its improvement goal. We then took a first pass at the cost of doing nothing (CODND) for this project-based process, which looked substancial. We also included one aspect for this cost that they never thought of before.

We then had someone in their organization send us some value chain metrics data that were related to the focus project. When examining this data we noted that there were many zeros for a time metric to do an activity, which was not possible. After getting explanation for the zeros describing another situation, we removed them from the data and created a 30,000-foot-level chart that described how to examine the value-chain metric for assessing predictability and providing a prediction statement. We presented this prediction statement in both a median and 80% frequency expectation of occurrence, along with the percentage of expected time beyond a target value; i.e., was beyond the target about 5% of the time. It looked like from the probability plot there were three distributions, which could be investigated further. However, even with multiple distributions we could still make fairly good projections.

We then created an Enterprise Process Improvement (EIP) diagram (see Volume II of the previously referenced book) which showed how this project and other projects could be aligned to overall business needs after the enterprise as a whole is analyzed; i.e., analyze phase of E-DMAIC business system roadmap.

Included a presentation of linkage of the system to an overall roadmap for improvement, as described in Volume III of the Integrated Enterprise Excellence system.

At the end of the day both George and Sam were very pleased with the PowerPoint presentation deck and its description of how their organization could benefit from IEE. They liked the IEE system and think that it would be a good fit for their company. This PowerPoint deck could now be presented to others in their organization showing IEE benefits to other influencers/decision makers for addressing a potential moving forward plan for an IEE implementation.

During the session, we also talked about how their development team could benefit from an IEE enhanced 1-week Design of Experiment (DOE) class where three teams would work up how they could use the techniques next week in their job. Attendees would be either part of the creation of a DOE for design optimization, design testing, or design handoff to manufacturing. The benefit of this session is building DOE tool knowledge in development to reduce the value-chain metric of development.