Hands-on simulation to demonstrate key metrics for control of processes utilizing lean and six sigma principles

Abstract

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.