Great emphasis is placed these days by private businesses and government agencies on quickly improving manufacturing and administrative processes through waste elimination and variation control. Lean manufacturing and six-sigma are two tools which allow substantial wasted effort to be eliminated and provide a statistical means to control variation in processes. Classroom simulation utilizing a simple product made from Lego® blocks was used to show how a process becomes inefficient through large batch processing and unbalanced operations, and is discussed in this paper. Also, how metrics to control a process should be defined and calculated are covered in the paper. These metrics include Lean six-sigma metrics of lead time, inventory efficiency, percentage value added time (%VAT), first pass yield (FPY) and rolled throughput yield (RTY). The concept of measuring the efficiency of a process utilizing operator efficiency is then presented and how it can be used to balance a process is discussed. Operator efficiency allows the simultaneous determination of evaluating how balanced the operations are in a process and how well the operators are performing. Utilizing examples of primed and un-primed processes, how the metric of operator efficiency can be calculated is shown in this paper. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.
CITATION STYLE
Mehta, M. (2009). Hands-on simulation to demonstrate key metrics for control of processes utilizing lean and six sigma principles. In ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--4507
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