Lab On-time Testing By Bill Poynor and Holly Duckworth September/October 2010 | Volume 6, Number 5
When Kaiser Aluminum Trentwood facility brought physical property tests of its metal products in house, the group began encountering delays. To combat this issue, the laboratory manager completed a Green Belt project to improve lab on-time testing.
A contract research manufacturer reduced the lengthy cycle time for the process of designing stability protocols, which are used in testing drug formulations and packaging.
The Depository Trust Co. (DTC) is responsible for allocating principal and income payments on the stocks and bonds it services. Defects in the multi-step process were causing problems. An Executive Green Belt project was launched to uncover root causes and identify solutions to ensure on-time payment allocation.
Age Verification Cycle Time By Sian Davidson, William Maloney, Marcus Ruff and Antoine Bonello March/April 2010 | Volume 6, Number 2
Betfair, an online betting community, used a rapid improvement process based on the DMAIC roadmap to address customer complaints that it was taking too long to verify that they were of legal age to gamble.
CT Scan Throughput By Nancy B. Riebling, Angelo Pellicone, Antz Joseph and Charles Winterfeldt January/February 2010 | Volume 6, Number 1
With a four-day Kaizen event, a Lean Six Sigma team improves patient throughput on two CT scanners at a tertiary hospital in the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System. Originally published in the January/February 2007 issue.
Of all the frozen items produced by Kahiki Foods Inc., egg rolls took the longest time to prepare for shipping, due to added steps needed to freeze the rolls to desired temperatures post-frying. Kahiki focused a DMAIC project on improving the freezing process capability to address the temperature problem.
Faced with customer dissatisfaction about how long the life insurance application process was taking, and as a result, fewer-than-expected sales, global financial services provider ING worked with one of its major distributors in a three-day Kaizen event to reduce the application cycle times.
Six years into the Six Sigma deployment at TRW Automotive, a team performed a DMAIC project to determine how the process improvement program itself could benefit from continuous process improvement. The project resulted in a monitoring method to report on how each business unit was performing on the critical factors found in the Analyze phase.
To mitigate inherent variation in supplier manufacturing processes and ensure customer satisfaction, a project team at Rockwell Collins Inc. applied Design for Six Sigma to a new product design and dramatically improved the manufacturability and reliability of the product.
At a Drug Analysis Service laboratory of Health Canada, an increased workload had led to long analysis cycle time of suspected drugs seized by police forces. Through a DMAIC project, the lab saw a 99 percent reduction in backlogged samples and reduced the total cycle time for common hard drugs by 50 percent.
On-time MRI Scans By Karole Sherlock January/February 2009 | Volume 5, Number 1
Evergreen Radia Imaging Center launched a DMAIC project to improve on-time radiology scans after adding a second, more sophisticated magnet. The project resulted in a 50 percent improvement, exceeding the team's original goal.
New Hire Turnover By David L. Marden November/December 2008 | Volume 4, Number 6
The voluntary turnover rate for new hires was above historical levels at Black & Veatch. To address the issue, the company's Six Sigma group led a three-day Kaizen event structured on the DMAIC roadmap. The project improved new employee satisfaction with the process and reduced the first-year voluntary turnover from 29 percent to 25 percent, resulting in a projected savings in direct costs of $500,000.
Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center's low compliance rate with a national clinical quality recommendation prompted a DMAIC project that resulted in dramatic improvements. Within just months of the project launch, the center's compliance rate went from 36 percent to 90 percent.
Delphi Thermal Systems applied the IDDOV
(Identify, Define, Develop, Optimize, Verify)
roadmap to develop technology to join dissimilar
metals for a new market application in
electronics cooling. The project resulted in a robust, cost-effective, high-performance, low-mass product that employs existing Delphi aluminum brazing technologies for heat exchanger production.
The cost analysis requirements document (CARD) is used by the Army and the Department of Defense to determine the cost for new systems and equipment, or the cost of upgrades to existing programs. If the CARD does not arrive when expected, it can delay the review for large Army purchases. To address this concern, the Army launched a project to reduce the cycle time of the CARD development process by 30 percent.
When energy producer Dominion joined a regional transmission organization, the costs associated with errors in electric load forecasting escalated. This award-winning DMAIC project resulted in improvements that reduced the DPMO by 49 percent and saved millions of dollars.
Electric Boat Corp. designs, builds, delivers and supports nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy.
The company's supply chain process utilizes the procurement process to ensure that material is available for construction. Although most of the material does not require inspection or certification review, 25 percent of it was nonetheless being directed to receipt inspection analysts. A noticeably high backlog of material led Electric Boat to focus a continuous improvement project on reducing the percentage of purchased material being routed to receipt inspection. The improvements saved almost $900,000.
Membership Renewal Rate By Ilona Kirzhner and Jeannette Kesmarki November/December 2007 | Volume 3, Number 6
This project, based on the experience of a small business, sought to increase monthly revenue by increasing the membership renewal rate. As a result of improvements, the non-renewal rate dropped from 60 percent to 41 percent. With additional planned improvements, the organization expects to exceed its project goal of 30 percent.
The credit card division of TD Bank Financial Group receives more than 3.7 million customer calls per year. Research showed that customers were experiencing a high level of dissatisfaction when phoning the call center due to the lengthy and complicated process to verify their identity. A Six Sigma project was chartered to deliver a more comfortable customer experience. The customer identify verification process now accounts for only 3 percent of the group's customer complaints compared to about 11 percent before.
The Xerox Co. designs, manufactures and markets iGen3, a color printer than can produce photo-quality prints at 110 pages per minute. When the current iGen3 was to be modified, the engineering team was tasked with redesigning the belt tensioning mechanism on the photoreceptor into a smaller package without adjusting the length of the belt. The redesign had to take several noise factors into account. The outcome of the project was a design that met the constraints placed on it by the system. This IDOV project is a practical
example of how Design for Lean Six Sigma (DFLSS) can bring about the best option available in a constrained design.
Non-billed Inside Wire Dispatches By Peter J. Sherman, Craig Broomberg, Les Crowell and D. Wayne Crosby May/June 2007 | Volume 3, Number 3
With revenues from inside wire dispatches down and non-billed inside wire dispatches at excessive levels, AT&T's Southeast region decided to find a sustainable, long-term solution that would offer a high return on investment. The goal was to reduce non-billed inside wire dispatches in four states by 10 percent - approximately 6,300 per year - corresponding to a $600,000 increase in annual revenue. A project team representing field operations, mechanized systems, the billing department and retail voice product development implemented a solution that far exceeded the original project objectives.
In this real-world project from EMC Corp., a Green Belt-led team reduced damaged material inventory levels by almost 55 percent and average holding time from 330 days to 56 days.
CT Scan Throughput By Nancy B. Riebling, Angelo Pellicone, Antz Joseph and Charles Winterfeldt January/February 2007 | Volume 3, Number 1
With a four-day Kaizen event, a Lean Six Sigma team improves patient throughput on two CT scanners at North Shore University Hospital. Project results:
Reduced average turnaround time from 20.7 hours to 11.6 hours
200 additional inpatient procedures per month
60 additional outpatient procedures per month
$375,000 in additional revenue from increased outpatient volume
ScottishPower (SP) Energy Retail processes 550,000 customer email and letter correspondence items annually using a computer-based scan and workflow system. Of this total, 2.3 percent are categorized as complaints, and a small percentage of these are subsequently escalated by customers to the independent energy consumer watchdog, Energywatch. Other types of correspondence are governed by SP's guaranteed standard of replying to the customer within five days of receipt of inquiry; otherwise, a penalty is paid to the customer.
This project earned the award for "Best Six Sigma Project for Service and Transaction" from IQPC in January 2006.
Website Response Time By Ilona Kirzhner and Michael Vikhman September/October 2006 | Volume 2, Number 5
FS Inc. is a relatively new, small U.S.-based company that provides a wide range of financial services. FS has been steadily growing its customer base, at a rate of 5 percent per month. Last year, FS deployed a client online account management system (OAMS) so that clients could access their accounts through the Internet. After an initial warm reception, OAMS drew complaints from customers about system slowness and lost transactions. A Six Sigma team addressed the customers' concerns and reduced the average response time by 90 percent.
A health insurance administrator went from a complex billling process fraught with inaccuracies to a zero error rate in customer-account fee withdrawls.
A Six Sigma team begins its project focused on meeting a customer CTQ, and in the end, not only makes dramatic improvement in meeting customers' expectations but also produces millions of dollars in savings for the company.
Through a DMAIC improvement project, the Six Sigma team reduced solder defects on printed circuit boards by 92 percent and saved the company $300,000 annually.
With an existing operational risk management system that was not capable of meeting current requirements, the Six Sigma team employed DMADV, one of many Design for Six Sigma roadmaps, to find an elegant and complete solution.
With a rigorous application of Six Sigma, the improvement team discovered a root cause no one expected. A no-cost solution saved this Fortune 500 company over $800,000 annually.
In this example of a Black Belt project presented at the final review, the improvement team reduced the defect rate from 88 percent to just 1.4 percent and saved the company $586,000 annually.
DMAIC storyboard and project review presented as if a Black Belt were giving the final presentation to your business' CXO or management team. In this case study, the improvement team achieves a 92 percent reduction in late deliveries.
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