yours_thina

I will go with questions 1 and 2 as such. But I will suggest to change question 3: A value adding activity is one that customer is willing to pay for. – Yes. To ensure the right first time delivery, customer will be willing to pay for. A value adding activity is transformational by nature. – Yes. Based on the activity value addition, it may tend to change by treating as Muda at one point of time and to include in other areas or to be modified based on the current requirement. A value adding activity is done first time right. - I suggest to change this question as “A value adding activity is for delivering first time right”. Every activity will have the error zone. Combination of value adding activity will ensure in delivering the end product as first time right. For example, capturing the financial data after interpretation as single eye may/will lead to error. A second eye check will help in ensuring the correctness of the data. The second eye check is the value adding activity.

Even though a product is invented accidentally, it has it's own process flow which should be documented with lean six sigma concepts to avoid and nullify Muda in process which will surely help in reaching the innovation point so quickly.

For any problem to occur at least one cause should be there and necessary. So I ignore all other three points except “A cause may be both sufficient and necessary for a problem to occur”. The best tool for root cause analysis is the Ishikawa diagram to map all the causes. And we have Pareto Chart and 5Whys to move towards the causes and to decide the issues to be taken care first. Next steps (PDCA): • Implementing the suggested action plan to nullify the error %. • Collecting another set of data to understand the improvement status. • If the data shows negative results, changing the action plan FMEA and Kaizen will also help in minimising the need of RCA in future.

Business Excellence: Best practices which will help to manage an organisation and to achieve the desired results. The practices should be derived from the policies which are customer focused and results oriented. This can be divided into multiple operational excellence goals department wise. Operational Excellence: Methodologies of the work floor to improve the organisation. These also focus on customer needs by keeping the employees as skilled, empowered and as continually improving in all the key performing areas. Process Excellence: It is an integral part of Operational excellence. This will stabilise and move towards excellence process wise to reach the goal of operational floor. Personal Excellence: Personal excellence is also an integral part of Operational excellence. This will enhance every employees skill set to match the process, organisational and business requirements individual skill set. Personal and Process excellence lead to Operational excellence which will in turn ensures the successful achievement of business goal with Business excellence.

Hi Shalini, Eventhough implementation of R&R at improve phase may show some improvement, it may thrash the objective of R&R. It would reduce the morale of the employees since there could be some more changes in the process and methodology. So it would be difficult to justify the performence from either end. It shall be implemented at Control phase then only R&R will start to harvest the real fruits. Regards, Thinakaran