The Drawbacks Of Lean Six Sigma

The Faults of Lean Six Sigma (at least at the company I’m at)

Some of these issues lie with in statements such as these….

·         

      We’re cutting way too many resources

·         Our manpower is going down we are asking employees to do more

·         We are asking our own associates to take responsibility for things that should be passed on to  management or a troubleshooter which puts more stress on them

·         We’re stressing about quality yet we are setup to be a production based business

·         Metrics are way too arbitrary it’s at a set point which you cannot fluctuate or bend or curve (for businesses who set the bar at a certain level and if your over you are penalized)

·         I feel like a robot

I will be taking you through a scenario which is what most businesses are going toward and in my opinion it is a big mistake. I’ve studied the lean six sigma process and I can say this, it works for “some” businesses, for instance, manufacturing, warehousing, logistics has had much success in it. Even though there are successes, there are many failures as well even in those aforementioned industries that I’ve seen firsthand. For example, a warehouse that had overzealous supervisors who were all about quality and a staff who were trained to pump and dump, it resulted in a very toxic environment, distrust, and a lack of production. Another example would be a place I worked at who “talked game” about lean six sigma but never actually implemented it, all the implementations were shoved to the side and only followed when visitors arrived (this place had high volumes of production and even though employees were not happy they worked as a team). In these two examples, was lean six sigma a good fit? Or were they better off without it and finding a better system to meet there needs.

Currently I work for a company who takes bits and parts of lean six sigma and incorporate it into their program. Now when I first joined the company my original thought was they are implementing this system to improve quality to cut down the amount of errors. Initially I was actually believing that I was with a company who implemented there form of sig sigma successfully. As time went by I started to realize the cracks. As I was getting acclimated, I automatically thought there was something wrong but I passed it off as being nerves my feeling was “something happened at this place it’s not like other jobs I’ve had” and I’ve had bad jobs with bad companies before. The atmosphere is gloom and doom, in fact, I call the supervisors and management the “legion of doom” (I keep that to myself). My feeling was that they had laid people off at that location, probably other locations as well. Also odd was the upper management they all had about 5 to 10 years with the company all coming from a manufacturing/production background for a company not even close to those respective fields.

In training, we are coddled, taken care of, and I guess they were just trying to make us feel at home, it was almost like a propaganda, I mean impressive cause most companies just throw you to the wolves. We were harped on quality and were told briefly it’s not about production anymore. After training, we’re in the que’s and told focus on quality not quantity. Infact, at the end of training they laidout what’s expected of us which bewildered me as to why they weren’t upfront to begin with and why none of the long timers told us anything, at least in other companies I would know what the company was really about in week one sometimes even in 2 or 3 days. We also have classes of errors; the higher errors is what they are focusing on, lower errors don’t mean anything (at least not yet who knows they may throw another curveball at us). Errors are reviewed and the reviewers make a determination whether it’s a major or minor error.

Then tell us this, “so yeah I know some of you guys are nearing that threshold for errors, focus on quality but try and to produce more so that you don’t get hard with an error” or “drive your error rate down by production” to me that’s confusing, (yes I know that they’re trying to say, find a good balance) but, what that statement really means to me is “produce more”. I’ve even talked with other people who said the same thing its confusing they talk about quality yet they want production (so it’s almost like a meter that’s just wiggling back and forth).  In my opinion this partly has to do with them shifting from production to quality so there’s push back on the quality stance plus they have a “flex program” that partly has to do with production. This whole company is about numbers, you have a management team that came from a production background, was in place with this company when the focus was production, and your trying to change the facility into quality. To be honest, they are succeeding don’t get me wrong their numbers are substantially better in the quality metric but at what cost…

This brings back to the mention of layoffs which I did find out happened (in other facilities in other states too) in some fashion no one is really talking about it though, and they fact that they are always hiring and most likely firing people too. So, they hire a group of people, train them, putting them in ques with the intention of keeping the best and dumping the rest. This is what I think is happening at the company I could be wrong but it would make sense as to why the atmosphere of that facility is gloom and doom and just different. If they are doing this I disagree with it and I don’t think it’s very lean six, here’s why your cycling through employees you’ve trained for the position. So, they fail, you’re just going to throw them away like a piece of garbage there’s is no leeway, there is no transfer into another department that would probably fit them better? You have lost an asset you have lost money how is this being lean?

You may say ok asshole what do think should happen Mr. know-it-all or you might not care which is fine by me. Well for one I would try and do more team based activities to get other people talking to one another and comfortable (they do this but it’s a halfhearted attempt and doesn’t happen often as it should-sign that the company is still about the production in my opinion). Take the micromanagement out completely in fact reduce the number of people with authority or “trainers”, have the employees police themselves, possibly have an environment where someone screws up another team member gets on them, or helps them, or whatever. This might not work and yea there will be jerks but it’s better than the micromanagement. Split the team up in categories production based/quality based the reason behind this would be to play to each other’s strengths and have a steady number of units being pumped out and reduce the errors. Of course, the company will not do this because it would require more manpower. This is how the flow would look, production team member cranks the units, those units get funneled into the quality section who looks it over, then it goes to review for the checking of errors (maybe elimination the errors classes as well). I would pay the quality unit more than the production unit; you want them to have experience and be thoroughly trained to look for errors. In addition, these teams would be balanced no overloading which means the production process would be longer but more efficient and accurate. I really think this process would work better but it’s just a theory and my idea is not lean six sigma I don’t believe in anything that has to do with six sigma in my opinion it works 50% of the time and you have to have the right formula to do it, have a nice day.