Starting to roll the wheel of Change

Finally after about a month of introducing the concept using LSS approach for the whole business it was able to get the attention of the top level executives. The recent recession paranoia followed by some of the highest price increases of raw materials served as the burning platform.
Identifying your highest cost center and selecting the projects which aligned to reducing those have greatly proved to show how we can reduce our cost and still maintain the profit margin despite the price increase. This is a good motivator as tell each person how their efforts are contributing to the companies success. The intangible benefit of this is now you have highly motivated people who know exactly what to do thus starting to roll that wheel of change in the right direction.
Now you will think its all that easy you will get everything done, but you have very limited number of managers and so many projects. how to overcome this challenge?
The to this is realizing how you can distribute right type of work to right type of people. Any organisation has lots of challenges to be resolved. If you look at those challenges in more detail, they can be classified as one requiring very high level thinking and are very complex; second requiring mid level thinking and are some where in mid range of complexity, and third are simple challenges which may not necessarily require complex thinking .I think may be they can also be classified as strategic level, tactical level, and operational level.
you will realise that there are very few challenges of the first type, some of the second type and lots of the third type. Thus it is critical to get the wheel rolling in the third kind without causing burden to your managers. A3 Storyboards is a good way to do this, where all the operators take control of all the small projects specific to their cell. Now there multiple projects running simultaneously without significantly burdening the managers, another advantage is now the operators own the change thus there is less resistance. The biggest advantage of this is the synergistic effect sets the wheel of change spinning in top gear.

Lean Six Sigma - The synergistic approach to transformation

"I always get questions like "which project should we do first?" ......"how can we get the benefits from this project quickly?"
my answer to the first one has always been 80/20 rule. the second one has been tricky many times as in the effort to get there quickly we miss many important steps which are necessary to sustain what is achieved by any process improvement."


Recently I came across this while reading a book:
"Its not Lean or Six Sigma , its not Lean then Six Sigma but Lean and Six Sigma" - Lockheed Martin

suddenly I realized why we had not seen any major turnaround despite successes with lean at various processes. we lacked the system to bring the process under statistical control.

More I read about Lean Six Sigma(LSS) I am more convinced that this the way to go. I have been trying to put all the pieces together over the year, like how to best capture the customer needs into your product, develop and launch products in quickest ways, control the production and quality , respond to the design changes in quickest way and above all how to incorporate all this into the corporate strategy , deploy it and execute it. I believe LSS will to bring all this under one platform giving better visibility and understanding of what it will take to make a great organisation.

Being involved and responsible for activities ranging from product development , production control, process improvement and to some degree of business development and strategic planing; you cannot have different goals or plans for different function. It forces you to be organised and understand the need for a unified plan to align all these activities. LSS will give this unified plan along with speed and control for the transformation process.

Now the biggest success factor which need to exist is the Management commitment and complete engagement. This would be a big challenge for small company with no previous experience of even a statistical process control. Thus I believe this can only be successfully communicated in the language that any top level executive understands...... Monetary Benefits!