10.4 Activities of the Improve Phase

You arrive at the Improve phase with a few vital process variables (Xs) that the team has screened in the Analyze phase. You now continue exploring those factors to arrive at the Y = f(X) relationship that the team will leverage and establish performance specifications for. The goal is to identify the most influential factors associated with your CTQ and explore alternative ways (change concepts) to perform processes containing them.

Let’s start by clarifying what a change concept is. Very simply, you can think of a change concept as a new or improved method for performing a step in a process where a key factor (X) causes your CTQ to be problematic. A change concept is a general notion that is useful in developing more specific ideas for changes that lead to improvement. Change concepts stimulate critical and creative thinking, which leads to inventive and distinctive improvement ideas.

The goal of change concepts is to improve the variation, stability, and mean of each CTQ. For instance, reducing the mean lead time (an X) to move blood tests to the centrifuge for testing by collecting the tubes frequently rather than waiting to batch them can be a change concept improving the turnaround time for the customer (CTQ).

Generating Alternative Ways for Running the Process

There are many generic approaches (change concepts) to modifying the Xs to help you develop solutions to improve a process. You and the team can combine these change concepts with the process knowledge you acquired in previous phases to spur creativity and develop impactful changes. The categories of change concepts include the following:

• Weeding out waste

• Upgrading workflow

• Managing time and variation

• Pruning inventory

• Managing mistakes

• Changing the workplace

Before delving into these generic categories of change concepts, let’s first pause for two crucial aspects in identifying alternative configurations for your current Xs.

1. You need to observe the participation and involvement of stakeholders who perform the process daily. Why should we care about this aspect? The reasoning is twofold: their invaluable process knowledge and the need for their buy-in for pilot tests and implementation.

2. You need to consider the concept within the circumstances of your particular problem and then turn it into an idea for a process improvement. It would be best if you made the idea sufficiently precise to describe how you can produce, test, and implement the change in the context of your flawed process.

The change concepts we will discuss next are not specific enough for your team to apply directly to making improvements. In brief, the change concepts are general and high-level; you can see them as initial ideas or conversation starters. Their purpose is to help you easily anchor discussions with your team on which change concepts look promising and leverage them to discuss specific improvements.

Weeding out Waste

Do you recall the TIMWOOD tool from Topic 2? In this discussion, you can reach into your toolkit bag and grab that instrument for review. In lean six sigma you can generally consider any activity or resource that does not add value to your customer as a form of waste. Following are some general concepts for eliminating waste.

Ban Unnecessary Things

You will notice in business practice that organizations undergo frequent changes for any number of reasons. As such modifications occur, the utility of resources and activities that were essential at some point in time end up reducing, sometimes significantly.

So how can you identify needless activities and idle resources? You can use audits, data collection, analysis of records, and gemba walk (as discussed in Topic 6 and Topic 7). Once you produce a list of unnecessary items, you remove them from the system.

Ban Data Redundancy

Have you been to a healthcare facility and filled out a form containing the same information you had already filled out in a previous stage? It is not uncommon to find circumstances where an organization records the same information in a database or log multiple times. As you would expect, such practice creates no value. In such cases, you can change the process to require only one correct entry.

Minimize Controls on the System

A common feature of organizational settings is the presence of various types of controls to guarantee that a process does not deviate terribly from requirements. For instance, some organizations require approval from multiple organizational levels for an employee to travel. Such controls protect the organization, but they can also increase costs and reduce innovation. You can review the controls used in a system to identify opportunities to reduce them.

Minimize Intermediaries

Another common feature of organizational settings is the presence of multiple intermediaries. Examples include distributors, handlers, agents, promoters, brokers, and carriers. While some middlemen are highly specialized and skilled—and so add value to your process—often you can produce improvements without reducing value by eliminating some of these intermediaries.

Minimize Peak Capacity

You will notice that some organizations design or recommend resources with the capacity to handle special or severe circumstances instead of the normal conditions; such practice results in the resource having idle capacity most or all of the time. Except in mission-critical situations, you can change the standard to the appropriate level of resources for the normal situation.

Upgrading Workflow

As you have studied in previous topics, organizations use processes to produce goods and services. As you focus on processes, you must examine the flow of work through the process. Are the various steps properly sequenced and prioritized? Is the workflow causing the process to behave more reactively than planned?

Here are some general concepts for upgrading flow.

Synchronize Stages

Observe a casual dining restaurant; notice that the production of menu items and services often involves multiple stages. The challenge is that these stages operate at different times and speeds. This problem is shared across organizational settings. Items spend too much time waiting to reach another stage. Synchronizing the stages can improve efficiency.

Minimize Handoffs

Return to the casual dining example; notice that in some restaurants the order form is often passed to multiple people to complete the service. Across organizations, specific items such as a form can move to multiple people, offices, or workstations during processing. Such practice can increase time and cost and reduce quality. Redesigning the workflow to reduce handoffs can improve efficiency.

Approximate Steps

Often you will observe that the people and facilities’ physical location negatively affects processing time and drives communication problems. You will create efficiencies if you can relocate adjacent steps in a process close together and facilitate the work passing directly from one stage to the next. The benefits include eliminating the need for communication systems and physical transport.

Undo Bottlenecks

Whenever demand of a step outpaces capacity in a process flow, you will have a bottleneck. Bottlenecks restrict the rate of production or the speed at which you process things. You can usually identify them by observing where people or things are waiting or accumulating. By unblocking or removing the bottleneck, you will improve the process.

Explore Automation

You can generate tremendous gains by smartly applying technology to “optimally designed processes.” This point is crucial, as automating an ineffective process will magnify the inefficiency. For instance, combining new digital technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), and machine learning (ML) can produce tremendous flow gains. Another example is connecting machinery to a business system leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT).

Managing Time and Variation

Variation is a serious problem for lean six sigma practitioners. It drives unpredictability and leads to quality problems.

Alongside variation, time is an equally serious problem. Excessive waiting time in the system, long lead times for orders and deliveries, and high process cycle time hide issues and can create problems and inefficiencies.

The following are general concepts for dealing with variation and time.

Standardize Work

A standard is the best, safest, and most effortless way to perform an activity or complete a process. When you implement the right amount of standardization, you can produce various benefits. For instance, standardization allows a process or worker to achieve consistent output, and it reduces the level of confusion and guesswork surrounding task execution.

Keep in mind that standardization is just a framework for people to operate, and it should not take away the freedom to continuously explore improvements.

Devise Classes

The team can come up with creative ways to take advantage of naturally occurring variations in goods or services. You can explore schemes to categorize products or services into different classes to minimize the variation within the classes and maximize the variation between groups of classes. You can then market the distinctive classes of products or services to different customer needs.

Reduce Setup

Setup time is the amount of time that is required to prepare a resource for its next run after it has completed producing the last part of the previous run. You can reduce setup time by becoming organized for the changeover. The length of time needed for setting up a resource can impact costs and flexibility. If you can minimize it, you can reduce the level of inventory needed and extract more productivity of resources.

Maintain Preventive Maintenance

Resources such as machines and equipment can break unexpectedly, wasting precious time of a process. You can minimize such breakdowns by performing proactive and preventive maintenance and placing a strong emphasis on resource operators to help maintain their equipment. Implementing a shared responsibility for resources that encourage greater involvement of those utilizing the resource can reduce the time that breakdowns would consume.

Pruning Inventory

During the pandemic of 2021, after the initial rush to the stores, a few people ended up having too much stock of toilet paper in their closets. Such stocks gobbled up sometimes limited space in people’s houses. Inventory can have a similar effect in organizations, as it requires capital investment, storage space, and people to handle and keep track of it. So next is a selected list of general concepts for dealing with excess inventory.

Pull the Work

When you implement a pull system, you perform the job at a given stage in the process only when the next step demands the output of your work. As a result, we consistently produce or purchase enough of what we need to replenish what we have just used. The trick here is to design the system to match operations with a downstream need. Among the benefits of this arrangement is the reduction in inventory levels.

Reduce Selection

The customer is king, as the famous saying goes. As a result, organizations often add many features to products and services to accommodate customers’ distinctive wants and needs. This can result in increasing items and more extensive inventories. Instead, you can examine each feature’s demand and group them to reduce inventory without negatively affecting the customer.

Reduce Brands

Similar in terms of effect to the proliferation of distinctive features, some organizations use more than one brand of a particular item. Unfortunately, such practice often increases the overall inventory level, as the organization needs to maintain stocks of each brand. Examine opportunities to downsize the number of brands while still providing the required service.

Match Inventory and Demand

This practice is the bread and butter of supply chain professionals but can go overlooked outside the field. One approach to minimizing inventory levels is using historical data to predict demand. You can use these predictions to make the most effective decisions considering lead times and order quantities to receive inventory from suppliers economically.

Preventing Mistakes

Have you ever sent a text message to the wrong person or taken the wrong highway exit? These are simple mistakes that perfectly exemplify the saying, “To err is human.” In organizational life, as in many other settings, errors happen because of the interaction of people with a system—in our earlier example, you press the wrong message or miss the exit sign. Simple mistakes that have simple solutions. This subject is so important that we will discuss it further later in this topic and again in another topic.

Not all systems are the same; some are more prone to mistakes than others. We call the redesign of a system to reduce the likelihood of errors mistake-proofing or error-proofing. Let’s take a look at some general change concepts aimed at reducing the chance of errors.

Differentiate

Small aircraft use various levers to control different aircraft performance. Unfortunately, the levers are close together, and using the wrong one can cause catastrophic issues. These mistakes occur because the pilots have to work with similar items all close to each other. Small aircraft combat this by having different shapes and colors for levers controlling the fuel, power, and propeller. This practice of breaking patterns by color coding, sizing, using different symbols, or separating items can be used in a variety of situations.

Constrain

You can devise ways to restrict the performance of specific actions. For instance, a red switch cover on top of the master battery switch in an aircraft is a constraint, as it blocks the pilot from inadvertently turning on the system. You can also break patterns by limiting actions that typically result in mistakes. The crucial point is to make the constraint visible and easy to understand.

Afford

In design, affordance is action possible in the relationship between the user and an object. For instance, the luggage containers on an aircraft afford opening to those that can reach the latch, but they do not afford opening to those who are too short to reach the latch. Affordance provides insights into using something without the need for explanation or label. For example, you see the container latch and know how to open the container and in which direction without further description. You can design your process in such a way that you lead users to perform the correct actions.

Prompt

Some studies suggest that we forget nearly 50% of new information within an hour of learning it. You can reduce mistakes by prompting or reminding people to perform all the necessary tasks. For instance, in aviation, a preflight checklist describes pilots’ functions before take-off. It increases safety by ensuring that crews do not forget any critical tasks. You can also use various reminders to prompt action, including an alarm on a clock, a standard form, and checklists.

Changing the Workplace

The last category of change concepts is so important that you have an in-depth topic covering it in the broader organizational lean context later in the book. Here, we discuss it more focused on the project improvement setting.

Before going further, you need to consider a crucial aspect of any improvement and innovation initiative that, more often than not, organizations neglect: the human potential. Such neglect can take place in two ways.

1. An organization does not distribute and describe the work adequately. A typical example is a misalignment between the goals and the reward structure of organizational functions. For instance, marketing and manufacturing are frequently at odds in terms of what they should accomplish, leading to unnecessary confusion and needless competition between one another.

2. An organization can fail to tap into human potential fully. This situation has become more critical as the workforce changes to include new generations (Gen X, millennial, Gen Z, etc.) and new economic models (e.g., gig economy). Moreover, people are in search of a greater purpose in life. Hence the common organizational assumption that workers leave their brains behind when they come to work: a terrible and too often true concern.

The crucial point is that you can change the workplace environment and drive performance improvements. As you explore the other change concepts to generate ideas to improve processes, you will create, test, and implement technical changes. However, these initiatives may fail to produce desirable results if work environment does not support the changes. Let's look at some general change concepts aimed at this issue.

Share Rewards

All major business processes face reasonable risk-taking and receive the accompanying benefits and losses. You can make people more interested in the performance of their operations when you can make clear to them how the future ties to the long-term performance of the system or organization. The potential ways to accomplish this are plans to share profit, share gains, and give bonuses.

Train

Training employees is the most fundamental activity when organizations attempt to make improvements or correct errors. Improperly training staff will invariably drive lower productivity, lead to more mistakes, and increase all forms of waste. You can justify the investment in extra training (do not consider it a cost) with the many benefits that stem from it, including more excellent morale and productivity.

Cross-Train

You cross-train an employee hired to perform one job function by teaching them the skills required to perform other functions. Such practice can build the skills of everyone in the organization and result in a better understanding of the bigger picture. More importantly, employees become more significant assets, more motivated, more engaged, and more capable of contributing at higher levels.

Create Transparency

You can still encounter organizations that carefully control the information available to various categories of employees and functions. However, when you make relevant information available to staff, they can offer suggestions for change, make better decisions, become more engaged and less suspicious, drive innovation and improvements, and take more effective actions.

The various categories of general change concepts we cover in this topic can help you and your team discuss and develop specific changes in Xs to improve your problematic process. The crucial goal of the change concepts is to inspire new ideas for you and the team when searching for improvement solutions.

You can choose one or more change concepts to explore with your team for possible application to a step in your problematic process. After creating a list of potential change concepts applicable to a stage in your process, you discuss them. Any promising ones are candidates for further discussion to generate specific ideas for a change.

Leveraging Change Concepts to Create Change Ideas

A change idea is an actionable, specific idea for changing a process. It originates from a general abstract change concept. For example, “managing variation” is a general notion, not a specific and actionable idea. However, a team creating a checklist to ensure the work performed in the purchasing department for invoicing satisfies the agreed-upon standard to reduce rejected payment is a particular idea (change idea) that falls under “managing variation.”

Let’s look at another example. A local family medicine health practice sees patients of all ages for wellness and preventative visits, chronic conditions, sick visits, and injuries. They position themselves in the healthcare market by reminding us that there was a time when physicians could give patients the time and attention needed for healing. But, in their view, modern medicine and healthcare dynamics have moved far from that earlier model.

They propose to bring back the earlier model with the benefits of modern medicine. They pride themselves in operating under a doctor-patient relationship approach called direct physician care. The direct physician care approach strives to restore the doctor-patient relationship by allowing the patient to deal directly with their doctor.

Let’s assume that they want to ensure that their patients can access their providers at the right time. The team can use various specific “change ideas” to reach that goal. So, they selected different “change concepts” and produced the following “change ideas”:

Additional Ways to Generate Alternatives

There are other ways to identify potential solutions, which you will study in other topics of this book. They include brainstorming, benchmarking, correlation analysis, and lean tools. We will take a final brief look at two tools not covered in other topics: Simulation and experimental design.

1. Simulation is a tool that you can use to build a model of a process and perform experiments on the approach to understand the behavior of the change concepts on the stability, shape, variation, and mean of the CTQs. You can find various off-the-shelf software options for such a purpose. In addition, this software allows you to save time programming and focus on running what-if scenarios and exploring alternatives.

2. Experimental design is a set of statistical methods for studying the relationships between the critical Xs and their interactions on the distribution of the CTQ. You can use experimental designs to analyze processes, products, and services. It uses analysis of variance (ANOVA) to partition the variation in your CTQ amongst the potential sources of variation.

Different topics in your book discuss the various lean tools, such as value stream maps, pull system, standardization, and heijunka. You can use any or all of the lean tools and methods as a potential change concept for one or more Xs that could improve the distribution of the project's CTQ. Each alternative solution comes with risk, so using a tool such as FMEA will help you assess and mitigate potential dangers.