Six Sigma in the real world - Toyota donates efficiency instead of money to charity

[Strychnine]

It feeds 1.5 million people per year?

Or is it more like 1.5 million meals?

Because according to the count in 2011, there are only 8.245 million people in New York City.

That statement means that kitchen feeds about 18.2% of New York's population annually.

From their site:
"Food Bank For New York City warehouses and distributes free food for over 1.5 million hungry New Yorkers each year."
"There are 2.6 million New Yorkers who experience difficulty affording food "


Wiki:
"Food Bank For New York City helps to provide approximately 400,000 free meals daily."

That's 146,000,000 meals per year.

[Baron Von Crowder]

The amount of time and energy wasted in some of the buisness world floors me. At my last gig, I found that we were essentially driving a route, then turning around and driving it backwards the same day. The area was a project that was handed to me to see if I could make it profitable. I spent a couple days a month working routes, talking to drivers and customers, and made a few small changes that saved 4 man hours and cut 200 miles out of the three routes per day. We made money that next month, and it had been loosing like crazy for two years.

After that, I got stuck with two more areas, stretching me from Shreveport to Lampasas.

[03trubluGT]

From their site:
"Food Bank For New York City warehouses and distributes free food for over 1.5 million hungry New Yorkers each year."
"There are 2.6 million New Yorkers who experience difficulty affording food "


Wiki:
"Food Bank For New York City helps to provide approximately 400,000 free meals daily."

That's 146,000,000 meals per year.

For such a rich city, that's a lot of need.

The amount of time and energy wasted in some of the buisness world floors me. At my last gig, I found that we were essentially driving a route, then turning around and driving it backwards the same day. The area was a project that was handed to me to see if I could make it profitable. I spent a couple days a month working routes, talking to drivers and customers, and made a few small changes that saved 4 man hours and cut 200 miles out of the three routes per day. We made money that next month, and it had been loosing like crazy for two years.

After that, I got stuck with two more areas, stretching me from Shreveport to Lampasas.

No good deed goes unpunished.

[Baron Von Crowder]

For such a rich city, that's a lot of need.



No good deed goes unpunished.

true story. The promotion and extra money sounded great at first, but when I was up at 3am to go bail out drivers that hit something, or a gate was broken, etc, it sucked. And they expected me to still run my regular 8-5 stuff too.

I learned a lot, but glad I bailed.

[bcoop]

I'm working for a company now that needs a good dose of kaizen. They just have too many people involved with every process and it slows things down. It is to the point that people won't make deals with us because they get a deluge of emails and calls from lawyers and other folks who should be back office support rather than in the trenches. You know it is bad when the guy who owns the place tells you to cut his own employees out.

Yep. Corporate bullshit slows everything down.

[Darren M]

I enjoy the theory behind 6S. Practice is always a different story.

[BP]

It's funny that Toyota's manufacturing process was inspired by an American supermarket chain originally. Now they are helping an American food bank implement the same processes.

Six Sigma processes work if you let them. What gets in the way is when people are more worried about keeping jobs than implementing processes that'd improve the company as a whole.

I've been through several Kaizens and a hand full of external audits and in my experience when management isn't willing to make changes they are a complete waste of time.

[Sean88gt]

I was introduced to this by the Navy...and was responsible for implementing it at my last command...Lean/Six Sigma with the Theory of Constraints. I like that stuff. The biggest obstacle to overcome is always everyone telling you why it won't work before they even give it a shot.

In theory, it's great. But they need to do a DMAIC exercise on the people involved in implementation. The ground soldiers, so to speak, either fight you the entire way, or implement it just long enough for you to move on to the next thing and revert to their old ways.

It's interesting how It always forces the employees to work well past their maximum work capacity. employees are miserable when this is implemented.

Right. And in my experience, punishes them as part of the costs savings initiative. When I was in Denver those cockrags actually did a "project" on single ply vs double ply and timers on the lights. Throughout the entire process they never stopped to think how this would affect the employees or the customers. First you had to wipe your ass with sandpaper and second, you had to do it in under 7 minutes since the lights were on a door switch opposed to motion/screaming. We had customers taking their trucks to other services centers due to this. The last thing a trucker that has been sitting for 6 days wants to deal with is buffing his asshole in the dark so a company could save $500/year per location. Employees would hop in their car and drive to some retail establishment, closest being about 3 miles away. So a 10min bathroom break would turn into a 30-45min ordeal.

I hate six sigma. I swear half the projects make things worse.

I think this goes back to the scope of the project as well as failed implementation. If you can establish value and a compelling reason why X will work in a manner that directly affects the individual in a positive way then success is much easier. It also becomes a war of picking battles wisely. Kind of like politicians, the projects team quickly finds they need to justify their jobs and they go bat shit crazy, for a group of ~8 or so with a median income of $90k plus. Keep in mind, the toilet paper idea would save $500 per location (21 locations) for a total of $10,500 per year plus the utility savings but never casting a thought to the cost of $20/hr employees going offsite (800 throughout the region) to use the bathroom. Except for the corporate office, they weren't having it. The corporate office deal was a big issue because the corporate culture was that they were better than the peons and this had employees talking about a return to a union (Cummins Colorado was union before becoming Cummins Rocky Mountain).

The problem with the projects group is that they were mandated by Mother Cummins (Matt will know all of this) and were required to do a certain amount of projects a year, in number and dollar value, to maintain ownership of the distributorship. This created a busy-work project team that over thought everything. We had to deal with the bulk of it because corporate was in Denver so we were the experimentation station for the region. This also hampered the benefits of any implementation because the employees were fed up with it all, due to the frequency and range of the projects.

Ain't that the truth. 100% of the employers I interviewed with asked no questions about it at all.

Most don't have a clue what it is or are fearful of over implementation.

I'm working for a company now that needs a good dose of kaizen. They just have too many people involved with every process and it slows things down. It is to the point that people won't make deals with us because they get a deluge of emails and calls from lawyers and other folks who should be back office support rather than in the trenches. You know it is bad when the guy who owns the place tells you to cut his own employees out.

Be very careful what you request, breathing life into 6s rarely comes with an end. I've got to jet, but I'll go more into a kaizen debacle when I get back.

The amount of time and energy wasted in some of the buisness world floors me. At my last gig, I found that we were essentially driving a route, then turning around and driving it backwards the same day. The area was a project that was handed to me to see if I could make it profitable. I spent a couple days a month working routes, talking to drivers and customers, and made a few small changes that saved 4 man hours and cut 200 miles out of the three routes per day. We made money that next month, and it had been loosing like crazy for two years.

After that, I got stuck with two more areas, stretching me from Shreveport to Lampasas.

true story. The promotion and extra money sounded great at first, but when I was up at 3am to go bail out drivers that hit something, or a gate was broken, etc, it sucked. And they expected me to still run my regular 8-5 stuff too.

I learned a lot, but glad I bailed.

There will always be slack and a need for the slack to be picked up. The secret is finding another person to make responsible so that your sleep isn't interrupted. Process improvement has it's place, but usually has some pretty costly human tolls as people get fed up with it, and I think this goes back to not selling it properly, failing at the implementation, and bailing out before the project is fully up and running.

[Strychnine]

The problem with the projects group is that they were mandated by Mother Cummins (Matt will know all of this) and were required to do a certain amount of projects a year, in number and dollar value, to maintain ownership of the distributorship. This created a busy-work project team that over thought everything. We had to deal with the bulk of it because corporate was in Denver so we were the experimentation station for the region.

I might, or might not, have completed an entire project (drop in power unit design/build/test) and then gone back and pencil-whipped it (how's that for some Office Lingo Bingo word usage?!) into a 6S project after the fact just to get some numbers on the books for the year.

[EW]

This is probably a better way to "give" to charities (or governments) since it seems so much money is misused.

[ScottJ]

Manhattan, wealthy predominantly. Other 4x borough's, < wealthy (and occasionally hood-rich). All 5x borough = nyc.