Everyone understands how the Lean Six Sigma DMAIC tools are beneficial to the practitioner; they provide a system to solve true business problems in a project format. This emphasis on projects may limit the true impact that a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) Practitioner can provide to an organization beyond the benefit of managing improvement projects.

This webinar series will examine eight common business practices that are not normally associated with a Lean Six Sigma program and will show you how to use your LSS skills to provide a benefit to each of these eight areas. These topics may provide you with an argument to convince your organization to allow you to participate in any one of these activities, which will improve your value to the organization. The more you are valued, the greater your chance of promotion and retention. If you are just an improvement project leader you may be at risk of being “downsized,” since you are not involved in the routine business activities.

We will host eight (8) webinars over a period of four months, one every other week. If you can not attend any event, there will be a recording available.

Webinar Topics and Take-aways

• Strategic Planning - Recorded
Does it appear that some strategic plans sound more like vision statements than actual strategies? It may be because many strategic plans are generated by committees using brainstorming and other opinion based tools. These are considered Lean Six Sigma DMAIC measure-phase tools. Have you considered using the define-phase concepts instead?  In the webinar we will walk through the use of many DMAIC define-phase tools along with a few others that you can use to support a strategic planning session for your organization. You will be able to quickly see that these Lean Six Sigma tools could be used to eliminate the vision-type strategies from ever making it out of the session.

• Reporting Business Performance - Recorded

If you are at the receiving end of fire-fighting activities that are triggered by a late recognition of performance changes, then this topic may be considered as a fire-prevention webinar.  In the DMAIC measure phase and analyze phase, we are taught many tools that can assess a process’ performance before working a project.  Unfortunately, our organizational leadership does not support using these tools to evaluate routine performance.  In this webinar we will show how to use the measure-phase tools (control charting) to perform routine assessments and build a set of rules that trigger an action before a problem occurs, and to use the analyze-phase tools (hypothesis tests) to evaluate if the difference we see between people or departments is real (significant) or just a random difference (non-significant).  How much smoother could things operate if we tested our beliefs before we jumped to take action?

• Scorecard Development - Recorded

The balanced scorecard has become a concept that many organizations want to adopt.  In the process of developing the scorecard, they must develop metrics and start assessing them.  Most organizations start by asking “What can we measure?” rather than asking the right question, “What should we measure?”  Lean Six Sigma tools have taught us how to determine the correct measure for a project, based on the problem statement and a few other factors, but consider these tools in scorecard development.  In this webinar we will show how the Lean Six Sigma define and measure tools can be used to identify the right metrics to include in a scorecard.  We will also introduce a few tools that derive from the Lean Six Sigma toolset that make this effort easy to perform and easy to communicate to your organization.

• Corrective Action Efforts-Root Cause Analysis (RCA) - September 8, 2010

The Lean Six Sigma toolset is not very efficient in addressing root cause identification for an single event (special-cause event) or problem, it works best to address chronic (common-cause problem) issues.  That should not imply that there are not Lean Six Sigma tools that can be used to support a root cause analysis or corrective action effort.  In this webinar we will show you a set of Lean Six Sigma tools that can be applied to these efforts, which may seem familiar to an RCA practitioner but they have different names in Lean Six Sigma.  We will work through a general corrective action event and show how the Lean Six Sigma practitioner can use their skills to quickly determine the root causes in a method that everyone will understand.

• Implementation Projects - September 22, 2010

How often do you see a Lean Six Sigma problem statement that indicates that the problem is the lack of a solution?  This may sound like “purchase order processing takes too long because there is no automated tracking system.”  We call these statements a missing solution masquerading as a problem.  The standard Lean Six Sigma action is to convince the sponsor to change the problem statement by removing the solution and then we will work the project.  This works fine unless the goal is just to implement the known solution.  Why should we run an entire project when a known solution is available?  If we ran a project and ended up implementing the same proposed solution we would have reduced the respect for the Lean Six Sigma program.  In this webinar, we will provide a selection of Lean Six Sigma tools that can be used to run an implementation project successfully, which may possibly be more effective than the standard project management tools.  In the end, you will build respect for the Lean Six Sigma program, by not treating every issue as a LSS project while providing a true benefit to your organization.

• Development Projects - October 6, 2010

You may hear that Lean Six Sigma is only for the improvement of existing processes.  That is not true, it is more versatile, but you may not realize it.  Design for Six Sigma is a requested class by many organizations because they think it is needed to work on any design or research project.  You should know that you can work on these processes without taking any additional classes and be successful.  In this webinar we will provide examples of how to re-order the project road map tool sequence in order to use the standard Lean Six Sigma tools to improve design processes and products.  Most Lean Six Sigma practitioners do not realize how to apply their tools outside of a typical project to help their organization, and this is a big way to help.

• Quality Assurance/Quality Control - October 20, 2010

Many organizations align their Lean Six Sigma efforts with the quality department, but keep the efforts completely separate.  There are a number of Lean Six Sigma tools that can be applied to the QA and QC efforts of an organization to drive significant improvements.  This is not running a Lean Six Sigma project, but the use of certain tools to assess the performance of the inspections, the quality of the auditing, and more.  We find that most organizations have a high level of faith in their QA and QC programs without understanding the power and effectiveness of these efforts.  In this webinar we will show you a series of Lean Six Sigma measure, analyze, and control-phase tools that individually can assess the true QA and QC performance and lead to quick and inexpensive improvements.

• Risk Mitigation - November 3, 2010

A few Lean Six Sigma project-problem statements read: Avoid problem               from ever happening again.  We can apply the standard DMAIC process to this issue to provide improvement recommendations to the organization, but is this the most efficient path to take?  The choice to execute a DMAIC project will take significant time and many of the steps are not very useful.  In this webinar we will provide a sequence of Lean Six Sigma tool usage that will provide a very comprehensive and long standing risk mitigation effort that is more than just using an FMEA.

Presenter: Rick Haynes, MBB Mr. Haynes is a Master Black Belt at Smarter Solutions, Inc. Haynes holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Idaho in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and a Master of Science in Statistics from the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. With more than 20 years’ experience in project management, training programs, applications, systems, engineering, and customer support, Haynes is responsible from providing consulting, coaching, and training to Smarter Solutions’ clients.

Co-Presenter: Forrest W. Breyfogle, III Mr. Breyfogle has conducted numerous Lean Six Sigma workshop sessions throughout the world -- serving a distinguished group of Fortune 100 clients, including Dell, IBM, HP, BAMA, and Motorola just to name a few. He has conducted both on-site and public Black Belt, Green Belt, Champion, and Executive training sessions. Mr. Breyfogle has authored or co-authored thirteen books, and published over 140 technical resources for well-known, worldwide publications.

If you are unable to attend the live events, a recording will be available for a period of 14 days following each webinar.

This is a single login purchase. For multiple workstation orders and group discount pricing, please call 512-918-0280.

For additional information, please contact Becki at 512-918-0280 or becki@smartersolutions.com.