Alan Harrison has over 12 years of experience in strategic business improvement implementation in world class, world-wideengineering and manufacturing companies. What is your background in Six Sigma, Lean and Kaizen?
What does Lean mean to you and to your organisation?
How mature is Lean at Weir Pumps?
What advice would you give to companies looking at Six Sigma, Lean, Kaizen etc.. What should they look for to know which (blend) of initiatives is right for them?
Where are you finding the biggest potential for savings?
In your experience, what are the critical success factors of Six Sigma projects in Europe?
What is your background in Six Sigma, Lean and Kaizen?
I have always aspired to achieve more with less and have always challenged the way I and others approach issues; questioning systems and assumptions in both my business and private life. So you could say that I have had years of experiencing improvement actions as a pragmatic thinker.
I was selected for Black Belt training in ABB Power Transformers over 10 years ago. Trained and later certified by Dr Mikel Harry, the original developer of Six Sigma in the USA, I am honoured to have had the opportunity to learn from a key figure in the industry today.
As an electrical engineer I was not adverse to applied maths, still, I wondered how I would survive 5 day, 12-hour training sessions! Harry filled the training days with mind bending puzzles, and more importantly delivered the sessions with enthusiasm and key messages which inspired thinking differently; the group was engaged the whole time.
When I returned from my first week of training, I mentioned to my wife – “This is going to be big; soon, any serious company will be running Six Sigma”. If anything, my timing was wrong but my prediction is certainly proving true in the UK today.
What does Lean mean to you and to your organisation?
Lean (and Six Sigma) are a way of thinking for me, and a way of going about our business for Weir Pumps. It is a way of using facts and statistics to describe and better understand what is going on in the real world in order to make right improvements in a right way.
Both Lean (usually linked with the Toyota Production System) and Six Sigma share the same core values as well as most of the improvement tools, although Lean is driven more by production strategy (e.g, 1-piece, pull system, flow ) and Six Sigma by statistics; the two complement each other very well.
It has been vital that the organisation is not overwhelmed with different approaches. The message therefore has been to implement one company-wide approach for continuous improvement of the way we do business. Everyone has been targeted for their involvement and participation in some way, leaving no stone unturned, and we have adopted the Toyota Production System (TPS) principles to our low volume, high complexity, designed and built-to-order environment. Everyone has been trained to some degree on what we have termed the Weir Production System, which includes but is not limited to TPS and Six Sigma. We have created a pragmatic pull improvement system (driven by business needs) where we define what is needed, when it is needed, and how to make it happen.
I believe that Six Sigma, Lean, Business Process Re-engineering, Kaizen projects etc are all happening at the task level: when someone needs to do something by a specified time. The goal of any improvement approach is to define, in an effective and efficient way, what needs to be done, by whom, how, why and by when.
Trainers and employees are continually trained and coached by a central Kaizen & Continuous Improvement team which is mindful not to compromise on the key elements e.g. people involvement, pull system, elimination of waste, continuous improvement, 1-piece flow etc. It is a pragmatic system in Weir Pumps so we can concentrate on the needs and results rather than just the tools used.
How mature is Lean at Weir Pumps?
By age, Weir Lean is a ‘toddler’ (just over 2 years). By results and behaviour however, it would be in its teens; the core values of the Lean personality are well defined, the directions have been set, tangible improvements already achieved, but there still requires participative leaders support to rapidly grow into the operational excellence adulthood.
What advice would you give to companies looking at Six Sigma, Lean, Kaizen etc.. What should they look for to know which (blend) of initiatives is right for them?
It is a decision that should be based on what both the organisation and their customers ‘crave for’, so you need to find out what this is through internal and external Voice of the Customer (VOC) techniques.
Whether you call it Plan-Do-Check-Act, Define-Measure-Analyse-Improve-Control or something else, here are some logical steps I would advise:
Learn about your customers’ wants and values Align your business purpose with those wants and values Understand where you are, and where you want to be, both in absolute terms and relative to other organisations Educate and align everyone within the organisation to understand where the company wants to be and key elements of that journey Translate these into practical objectives, prioritise the gaps and attack them Support the right people to use the right tools at the right time to keep closing those gaps. Embed 5Why’s and ‘Gemba’ into everyone’s behaviour. I believe that those two are like communication; you can never have enough.
Where are you finding the biggest potential for savings?
Any waste is a great opportunity, and the biggest improvement potential is recognised by understanding what the customer (either internal or external) actually values and desires. Enrolling the customer and suppliers into the Weir Production System is a recent but very important development.
In your experience, what are the critical success factors of Six Sigma projects in Europe?
I am still conducting my own research and benchmarking activities through the Scottish Engineering Lean Six Sigma Club in Glasgow, also present as User Group in Glasgow, but certainly I have found the following steps to be critical success factors for Weir Pumps:
Create a Pull System – Projects pulled from and defined by business / customers’ needs Champion the projects by business owners who have the ability to create and share the vision and passion and means to drive and support delivery Communicate and drive positive dissatisfaction with current business performance; now is the best time to fix something we should have fixed in the past Promote that the smallest action is larger than the biggest intention.
“I neither live to work nor work to live, but endeavour to live my work” – Alan Harrison
