Finding and Selecting Good Six Sigma Projects

By B. Krishna (iSixSigma)

Obvious Areas For Improvement

External Defects
 Anything you have recently been audited or formally rejected for
 Anything you haven't been audited or rejected for, but you know is out of specification or not meeting regulations
 Anything you inspect and/or contain to protect the customer
 Anything you cover for by having a guy in the customer's plant, etc.

Internal Defects
 Any scrap issues, parts, or materials
 Anything you rework/recycle in house - you should keep accurate track of rework by defect
 Anything you have a poka yoke for - you should know how often the poka yoke is catchingsomething and then try to
figure out how to prevent it rather than catch it

Efficiency/Capacity Issues
 Anywhere you make less parts than expected
 Anytime you are currently working non-customer driven overtime
 Any process where you are running slower than expected cycle
 Any process or machine with downtime
 Any process with premium freight costs
 Any process that has added labor to make the required cycle

Other Plant Cost Drivers or Measurables

 Any cost driver with a negative variance may point to a project
 Any plant metric that is important and runs at an unacceptable level or with large amounts of variation is a good
indicator for a project 

Less Obvious Areas For Improvement

Material Utilization
 Any part which uses more than the standard amount of material
 Any part in which the amount of material used varies - reduce the variation and shift usage to the lowest limit

Understanding Process Variation

 How much variation is there in your incoming materials and/or process parameters and how does this affect your
output?
 Where do you need the input controlled to always have a good output?
 Can you scientifically adjust your process to compensate for changing material, weather, etc.?
 Can your Black Belt help your supplier do a project to control the incoming product where you need it?
 Does understanding your inputs allow you to produce a good part using less material?

Maintenance
 For high failure rate or high replacement cost items, what causes the failure?
 Can you reduce the failure rate by understanding and controlling the process?
 Study how to predict failures so replacements can be made during scheduled, rather than unscheduled, downtime.

Efficiency/Capacity Issues
 Learn how to speed up or slow down your cycle time by changing your process inputs.
 Use this knowledge to produce customer over-time parts on straight time, or to do scheduled preventive
maintenance during the week on straight time. 

General Guidelines for Project Selection

 Any project should have identifiable process inputs and outputs.
 A good six sigma project should never have a pre-determined solution.
 If you already know the answer, then just go fix it!
 For projects that have operator or operator training as an input, focus on ways to reduce operator variation,
therefore making your process more robust to different or untrained operators.
 All projects need to be approached from the perspective of understanding the variation in process inputs,
controlling them, and eliminating the defects.

Example #1
Problem: We are experiencing slow cycle time at Station 30 because we are getting bad parts from Station 20 and
have to rework them.
Non-Six Sigma Solution: Rebalance the line in order to do the rework and keep your cycle time below specifications
while not spending extra labor cost.
Six Sigma Solution: Investigate and control key inputs that contribute to making a bad part production at Station 20.

Example #2
Problem: We have had 2 quality related issues reported this year for missing armrest screws.
Non-Six Sigma Solution: Add sensors to detect screws further down the line. If screws are missing, operator
manually fixes.
Six Sigma Solution: Determine process inputs causing missing screws. For example, auto gun does not always
feed correctly due to air pressure variation. Either study range required for 100% operation and control in that range,
or find way to make gun more robust to range of variation experienced.