Hari Shyam Gupta

In this age when things change significantly every day, businesses and leaders have to be agile and adaptable. We've to always focus on improvement and develop new things before our competition overtakes us. Six Sigma provides us a combination of tools, techniques & methodologies that gives us quantifiable results out of the "sample" which can later to used to improve the "population". In process industries, where we want to minimise defects and streamline our processes, DMAIC methodology provides us with tools to make that happen. When we have to develop a new process entirely, we can use DMADV methodology. In this VUCA world, this importance of 6 sigma is more than it was earlier.

Control plan is a document that provides the list of measurements, inspection and quality checks to be done through the process at different phases so that it conforms to the required specifications and reduces the possibility of non conforming output. It saves cost of processing and time and cost of rework. Control plan can be developed be following procedure. 1. Review the PFD (Process Flow Diagram). 2. Review DFMEA 3. Review PFMEA 4. Review special characteristics matrix. 5. Review lessons learnt documents. 6. Brain storm within the team.

There are multiple differences between projects and processes. Going by the description of PMI, "projects are one time endeavour" whereas, processes are repeated. Projects and processes both have a defined methodology, but each project is unique and different from another one. The terms cannot be used interchangeably because of clear difference in the definitions. Examples are: Project: Setting up a new manufacturing facility or developing a new car model (product) or improving a process to reduce the cycle time/takt time. Process: Series of defined steps involved in production of a car.

The practice of storing the SKUs exactly where they'll be used is called POUI. This practice helps minimise the inventory kept on hand and optimises the storage space available.

Regression: It will give us list of all the independent variables and also provide the factor by which the independent variables (x) effect the dependent variable (y).

The main reason why most of the organisations give least priority to "lessons learnt" is the fact that when a project is complete and it's time to draft the LL document, the project manager, users and the sponsor is much more interested in starting the operations. Most of the projects get completed when the target date is overshot or on a date very close to target date and the project team are too busy in starting the operations because they have certain targets to meet. Another prominent reason is that oftentimes, when the project team are about to reach to completion, they are too exhausted and just want to complete the project and get out of it. Drafting LL document would need them to further dwell into the thing of past.