Years ago, I managed an insurance claims paying
office. It was important not only to pay
the claims correctly, but on a timely manner.
The contract has provisions that if they weren’t we were penalize a fee
that had to be paid back to the customer.
The company serious with this intent had management participate in a
seminar that addressed this issue. It
was called Management by Objectives by Peter F. Drucker. I remembered learning this in college, then a
blur, remembering bits and pieces. This
four day seminar dissected the concepts and introduced practical
applications. Little did I know, this
class introduced me to Lean concepts before it was popular and it helped
provide the base of what I needed to enter into the realm of Lean. Those of you who don’t know, Ed Deming
learned from Drucker. Deming was hired
by the Japanese to improve their car manufacturing production lines in a
company called Toyota. I didn’t know
this till I started taking classes in JIT Toyota Production Systems that it
fell into place. Of course it led me
into learning more about Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, Gerber’s EMyth, and
Motorola’s Six Sigma methodology that there rehashed and fortified in my
American Production and Inventory Chain Society (APICS) classes. Without saying, there was a tremendous amount
of information that micro-managed every single aspect of running a business,
any business. Some use it in politics,
others in dealing with personal life’s issues.
When this learning was reinforced by my current company not
only having me take refresher courses in Lean but implementing these concepts
in our daily operations to maintain our ISO Certification, I needed to simplify
it into its basic form. Kind of
putting it into a 25 or less word sentence type of thing.
My thoughts:
Impossible.
So I started taking notes and reading everything I could
find. Of course it got worse instead of
better.
When I finally reached a point of exhaustion, I flipped the
pages on my screen and found a colored graph that had the acronym DMAIC. Funny, because in my classes and pages of
reading, the term “De –MAY- IK” was said and referred zillions of times. I even said it, but in my context, it was
just saying it to be like others. It
meant nothing because I was dissecting single celled portions of the theories
that the heart and soul did not set in.
Define problem and identify the process
Measure Critical to Quality metrics
Analyze root cause
Improve by implementing solution
Control by sustaining gains.
Biddy-bang-biddy-boom.
There it was. Took me 30 seconds
to say over again and memorize. I mean,I
had Catholic prayers that strung a list of ten times more words.
And for some reason, when this acronym etched in my brain,
things started to fit into play. I
started remembering things like: 5S,
fishbone, statistical analysis; DOE, ANOVA, PCE, VA, NVA, VSM, Takt, Time and
Motion, C&E, CTQ…list goes on and on.
Now I’m not going to say I’ve all of a sudden turned into a
know-it-all, but certain revelations are satisfying and this start has opened
my eyes to a world that I lived in but didn’t realize it ramifications.
Definitely, I’m going to dig deeper.
