Drive continuous process improvement

- Business icon W. Edwards Deming said, "If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, "you don't know what you're doing." As a manager, once you understand your process, then your job is to find ways to make that process even better. So I want to share three powerful techniques for continuous process improvement and explain how each of them can help you drive improvements in your own supply chain. Let's start with Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a mathematically-based approach that uses facts and data to reduce the variations in a process. The goal of Six Sigma is to make every process repeatable, to ensure it works exactly the same way each and every time. When a process is repeatable, we say that it's stable, or in control. When you use Six Sigma to improve a process, you follow a five-step approach called DMAIC. Define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. Lean is a management philosophy that was first developed by Toyota as a different way to run their manufacturing business. That's why you also hear it called the Toyota Production System. It's also why many of the key terms are Japanese words. The goal of Lean is to ensure that everything flows smoothly in a supply chain. There are three things that interfere with flow: Mura, Muri, and Muda. Mura is unevenness or variation. Mura leads to interruptions in flow, which makes a supply chain less efficient. In other words, it creates waste. Muri is overburden. When you use equipment too hard, it's more likely to break down, so Muri causes waste too. And Muda is waste itself, the stuff that costs money without adding value, like waiting and overproduction, or unnecessary transportation and untapped skills. There are actually eight different kinds of waste and you can remember them with the acronym TIMWOODS. The benefit of a process improvement can usually be measured as a reduction in one or more of these eight wastes. So the goal of Lean is to create smooth, balanced flow in a supply chain by eliminating Mura, Muri, and Muda. The final process improvement philosophy is the Theory of Constraints. This approach comes from a novel called The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, and it's designed to help manage capacity. Goldratt tells the story of a factory that's very inefficient and explains how they improve by always focusing on the slowest step in their process, their constraint. They achieve the goal of making the factory run smoothly by always improving the constraint, because that's the one step that's slowing all of the others down. For a closer look at how to implement these process improvement techniques, check out the course from my friend Chris Croft, Process Improvement Foundations. To learn more about implementing Lean, check out Steven Brown's course, Lean Foundations. And for more detail about Six Sigma, you can watch Richard Chua's courses. And remember, the way you make process improvements is through a series of projects. So for tips and techniques to help you lead all of your projects more successfully, check out my course, Leading Projects. In any manufacturing or distribution process, your objective is to have a smooth, steady, efficient flow. Six Sigma, Lean, and Theory of Constraints are three different process improvement approaches that can help you reduce the unevenness in your supply chain operations and deliver better results for your business and for your customers.