That’s because Goodall, who is the production director at APS Group, hasn’t mastered the art of kung fu or karate – he’s a master of the business process improvement methodology Six Sigma.
Since he started learning the principles of Six Sigma five years ago, Goodall says that APS has enjoyed a number of different benefits from a reduction in lead times and defects, through to the ability to raise capacity and get work through the door quickly. As you’d expect, Goodall evangelises about the transformative powers Six Sigma can have on a business, but rather than keep this as APS’s secret sauce he wants the entire UK printing industry to follow his lead and implement lean methodologies.
“Lean is going to come into this country a lot more over the next 24 months,” says Goodall. “When they’re looking for ops directors or production managers, most big corporations are looking for certified black belts because of the benefits that comes out of Six Sigma. As an industry we’re a long way behind other sectors, but it’s important that we start pushing and dragging our industry into the 21st century because businesses within the printing industry are not capitalising on the changing environment and realising that there are better ways of running their business.”
So what’s all the fuss about lean methodologies like Six Sigma? How do they work, how should companies go about implementing them and what are the benefits and potential pitfalls of turning your workforce into a crack team of black belt wearing lean practitioners?
What is it?
Six Sigma is a business process improvement methodology that was essentially built off the back of the lean methodology Kaizen – a Japanese word meaning ‘good change’, but in the west it’s been interpreted as ‘continuous improvement’. Kaizen was founded in Japan following the end of the Second World War when the nation started to rebuild its economy with the help of the US, and it’s widely credited as being the original process improvement methodology.
Over time Six Sigma evolved into one of the most commonly used lean business improvement methodologies thanks to the efforts of large corporates like Toyota, Motorola and General Electric, who popularised the approach.
Matthew Peacock, director at lean consultancy Active PPP, says that Six Sigma techniques are based upon the “systematic application of statistical process control to minimise process variations led by expert statisticians. For some years Six Sigma was seen as an alternative – even a rival – business process improvement methodology to lean. And recently lean and Six Sigma have been brought together as one methodology ‘lean Six Sigma’.”
How does it work?
The aim of Six Sigma is to achieve consistent output, stability and accuracy through process improvements. These improvements can be implemented across a wide number of different business disciplines – from the productivity of a sales team through to the efficiency of press minders on the factory floor.
To implement Six Sigma successfully everything in a business becomes process driven and everything is measured. “You map the process and then you seek to improve the process,” explains Nick Devine, founder of The Print Coach.
The mapping and subsequent quest to find what Devine describes as “small ways of creating incremental improvements in a multitude of different processes”, is undertaken by an infrastructure of experts in quality management methods – these experts are designated as ‘yellow belts’, ‘green belts’ and ‘black belts’.
The major difference between Six Sigma and kaizen is the latter is a lot faster and easier – some companies run kaizen ‘events’ within Six Sigma.
“With kaizen you ask simple questions, you take small actions and you solve small problems,” says Devine. “The key thing is you start small and build momentum so you have to stay focused on the small thing that you’ve decided to focus on otherwise the momentum won’t happen.”
What sort of businesses does it suit?
Although in theory any business could implement Six Sigma, it typically works best at larger companies that have more resources to throw at it.
“Given that the printing industry is mostly made up of small and medium-sized businesses there will only be a small proportion of people reading this article for whom Six Sigma will be massively beneficial,” says Devine. “That’s because Six Sigma is quite a complex process-driven methodology and for most of the printing industry it’s like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.”
That’s not to say that Six Sigma will necessarily work wonders for every large printing business that decides to implement it. As Peacock explains, when it comes to lean process-improvement methodologies, it’s very much a case of horses for courses.
“As a practitioner I personally don’t believe in any single dogmatic approach,” he explains. “I do what works: I try to understand an organisation’s place in the market, its strategy and the directors’ priorities and expectations. I will then use whatever concepts and tools that my experience tells me are appropriate to solve the problems in hand, whether labelled lean or something else.”
What’s the best way of implementing it?
Firstly you need to gen up on Six Sigma to make sure that it’s right for your business – there are plenty of useful books about the methodology available (see further reading list). Then you need to select people within the business who will be trained up as yellow, green and black belts by specialist Six Sigma training companies (see training providers). These people will be tasked with implementing the changes and ideally should work across numerous different areas of a business – from accounts through to the factory floor.
Getting this spread of workers across different business disciplines is important because as Goodall explains “if you want to do it and you want to do it properly you should embed it in the whole ethos and culture of your business – from the managing director through to shopfloor workers and all the way back up the staff hierarchy”.
But be warned – improvements won’t just happen overnight, as if by magic. You have to stick at it because there are always going to be some people who are resistant to change. “It’s just human nature,” says Devine, who cites the following example to illustrate his point.
“Imagine you’re running a printing company and you call the sales team into the boardroom and say ‘guys, I’ve been looking at our accounts, territories and the sales compensation system and I think we need to make changes in those areas’. Does that team of sales people automatically think ‘oh, that’s good – things are going to improve’? Or do they think ‘my territory is going to get cut, my targets are going to go up and I’m going to earn less money’? The default thought process is, if change is going to happen, I’m going to be worse off.”
Goodall recalls meeting this type of resistance when he first touted the idea of implementing Six Sigma. Indeed he concedes that during the first six to 12 months of implementation it was a “turbulent” time for the business with one of his first tasks being to identify the different character traits of staff as defined by Six Sigma – namely: winners, spectators, deadbeats or terrorists.
“Anyone bringing in some kind of change process to a manufacturing business is always going to encounter people who say it’s not going to work here,” says Goodall. “So I had an idea in my mind that there would be some terrorists and there would be some spectators, but then there would be winners who were willing to come along with it.”
To ensure people came on board he introduced a number of Six Sigma techniques to his own management team over a 12-month period so as not to push through radical changes too quickly. He also organised workshops to help staff cope with the changes that they were going through.
“We already knew that people were going to be perplexed, angry and standoffish,” says Goodall. “We also knew there was going to be a period of disorganisation within the business as a result of the changes. But as the training went on and everybody started to get a better understanding, became more knowledgeable and felt more confident and compliant we started to reorganise ourselves.”
But one of the most critical things Goodall did was rather than just impose his own will, he got staff to contribute to setting the new performance parameters that the business would measure itself by, which was vitally important, particularly on the manufacturing front.
“We got the machine operators together and said ‘the manufacturer says that machine can run at X sheets per hour and it takes 20 minutes to makeready, but you makeready in 25 minutes, you makeready in 40 minutes, you makeready in 37 minutes and you do it in 22 minutes’. What became obvious to them straight away was that we couldn’t afford to have that variation. I then got them to test the machines and to tell me what the makeready target should be. Between them they agreed to set a makeready target of 20 minutes and then anybody who felt that they needed training to make sure they could meet that target got it. By using this approach I got complete buy-in to the process.”
What are the benefits?
It allows companies to achieve consistent output, stability and accuracy across any number of different business processes. This ultimately brings with it efficiencies and in turn cost savings.
“Data is king and variation is the enemy,” says Goodall. “Thanks to implementing Six Sigma we now manufacture to a world-class standard. We measure our machines, we look at their effectiveness and everybody within the business understands waste. It also gives people the opportunity to read their environment and how they contribute to the wider piece of the business.”
Case study: Benson Group
Leicestershire-based Benson Group began implementing ‘Lean Sigma’ – an approach that is intended to combine the best of lean and Six Sigma – in August 2009 at its Benson Box Bardon facility after appointing David Midgley as operations director.
Midgley set out a plan to implement Lean Sigma over a four-year period with each piece of equipment given its own record book and each operator given their own individual programme, which included production targets. To ensure complete transparency throughout the company statistical analysis boards were erected in the production area so that shopfloor staff could see how each part of the business was performing – the boards also highlighted which shift was posting production records.
It was envisaged that year one would be all about putting the basics in place and getting staff to buy into the aims of the project, but by December 2010 the company had already enjoyed double-digit improvement in terms of printed sheets on the floor, which Midgley says is a key measurement for the overall success of the business.
“Once you can demonstrate that sort of improvement, both senior management and team leaders around the factory are on your side,” says Midgley.
Although Midgley has since left the company, Benson reaped the rewards of Lean Sigma, according to the group’s managing director Mark Kerridge, who offers the following words of advice to companies considering going down this route.
“Along with rapid growth and successful expansion it is vital to pay attention to every member of the team and every small part of the manufacturing process,” says Kerridge. “That in turn helped us as a business to identify any potential problem areas within production.”
Case study: DST Output
In 2008, DST Output consolidated all of its South East production facilities into one building in Dagenham. “At that point, and over the following years, a variety of sites were relocated under one roof, bringing a range of differing but similar standards, processes and working practices together,” recalls Bill Cook, head of lean and continuous improvement at DST’s Dagenham site. “In order to maximise the benefit of location consolidation, efficiencies and workflow integration became vital.”
But rather than just use one lean methodology he decided to take a multi-pronged approach, adopting 5C, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), total productive maintenance (TPM) and value stream mapping.
“5C workplace organisation is where we started,” says Cook. “As for other methodologies, there is generally a tool that fits each need. So we needed a metric to take the pulse of the business and OEE fitted nicely. We needed a maintenance programme that helped reduce breakdown hours and TPM helped. As for value stream mapping there is no better way to see the full picture of a process and identify efficiency opportunities.”
He was helped on the journey by DST’s US-based owner who was already a strong advocate of lean and as a result was very happy for the UK operation to investigate its benefits further. But it wasn’t just about getting buy-in from management for this new approach.
“All implementation has to come from the shopfloor up,” says Cook. “Certainly management can set the direction and champion the cause, but it is essential that ownership comes from the workforce – we call them ‘associates’. They know the issues best and they have to own the process. We believe that all of our associates need to feel that they can effect change to truly own the process, so when we run kaizen events we ensure that participants are empowered to make change there and then. It’s such an important part of empowerment and engagement.”
Since implementing this lean approach the changes to the business have been monumental, says Cook. “We are more productive than ever and that is down to a huge improvement in efficiency. Our gradual increase in our OEE scores complement our output figures.”
As for what words of advice he would offer companies considering going down this route Cook replies: “Give it a go. There is no improvement without change.”
Further reading list
Six Sigma For Dummies
Part of the ‘Dummies’ series, this book provides a nuts and bolts breakdown of how the lean methodology works
One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, by Robert Maurer
A short, simple to read and very practical guide to kaizen
The Four Steps To The Epiphany, by Steve Blank
This is not a traditional book about lean but is more focused on how lean can be applied to the ‘business growth’ aspect of a company
The Gold Mine: A Novel of Lean Turnaround, by Freddy & Michael Balle
This is written in novel format and discusses the operational and people issues associated with lean
Lean training providers
Active PPP
The Print Coach
The Knowledge Academy
Silicon Beach
The Lean Six Sigma Company
