Define Phase

Hi my name is Brian and as part of my course in six sigma I will be under taking a green belt project using a DMAIC approach to initiate a process improvement within our system to achieve a higher output in an 8 hour shift with the same head count as present, and also with a huge focus on not increasing the ergonomic strain on the product builders.

I started the Define stage by drawing up a detailed process flow chart; this outlined all the steps in the process that I need to improve, i.e. the steps within the process along with materials used and how many product builders were involved. With all these steps highlighted I was able to select three product builders that work in the relevant areas I will be focusing on (they would be subject matter experts in their roles), to join a team which I will head up under the supervision of the shift manager and a black belt sponsor.

With the team now picked I held a brainstorming session which was key in defining our goal from this project as getting the team together and ensuring that all members have the same understanding of the problem. Using this tool we created our problem statement and our objective statement.

Problem Statement:

More output required to bring down cost of labour per unit

Objective statement:

Increase output in a ‘’Pod’’ per shift thus reducing the labour cost of a unit without increasing ergonomic strains on the product builder

By outlining where we are at present with data we collect daily across all three shifts, that being outputs per ‘’Pods’’ per shift. We were able to establish our base line and our metric that we want to improve, next we started to come up with ideas on what was stopping us achieving more output per ‘’Pod’’. Furthermore with the data collected over the past few months we were able to identify that the average cost of labour per unit alone was $18.50 over the last four months which is $0.23 more than our target labour cost of$18.27, this adds up to a substantial amount over a year with a build plan of 300,000

In summary the tools I used and found helpful were a Process Flow Map and Brainstorming. I thought about using a Fishbone Diagram but felt at this stage a Brainstorming session was more suitable helping to identify what the team saw as the biggest issue's at present. With these identifed we can now set out a system to start measuring for our next step in the DMAIC process.