Learn Lean - 6 Sigma with Free Lessons & Tips

The engineering change process is initiated when customer, manufacturing partner, or internal employees raise an objection or highlights a problem with a product. Manufacturing, operations, engineering, and others discuss the problem and determine what plan of action should be taken. Engineering Change Management (ECM) equips organizations to systematically document all of the change from diagnosis  to planning and implementation of the updates.

Organizations typically use various change forms throughout the change process. SAP facilitates organisations to pace up the introduction of Change Request Management for the company.

Engineering change management introduces structure and discipline to the product data management process, and equips products to be defined, released, and revised in a regulated manner that is supported by workflows.

Question:

What are the Top 5 or 10 metrics that you choose at Team, Program, Portfolio level, and also for DevOps and Quality/testing area and why? Also, what key metrics you showcase to Business to engage them positively. It is a financial service based company already following agile at scale and has a complete CI/CD pipeline in place.

Answer:

For an interview, the purpose may be interviewer wants to understand what all metrics you know, and for that, you might use the above metrics mentioned. For practical purposes, the first thing I think we should ask is what is the goal of metrics and what specific questions they want to answer? Like if they want velocity what exactly they would like to understand from velocity. We need to understand those first.

To guide them is a nice thought. but we humans make judgment calls often on these metrics :) that's where the whole problem lies. People try to inflate metrics. So teams need safety first, probably the reason why any metrics in general theoretically sound fine but won't work practically.

At the team level or program level or any level. We must try to improve relentlessly and try to deliver more value with better quality. I know this sounds very generic, but I think that's where teams should start thinking about what metrics better suit them.

Team level

- Sprint burndown/burnup, Velocity, Estimation Variance, Scope Variance, Backlog Health, cycle time (Time to build, Time to Value), lead time, throughput, CFD, Escape Defects, Cost of Each Sprint, Cost of Rework, Escape Defects, Defect Density, Build Efficiency, Planned velocity vs actual velocity. Agile Maturity Assessment at each team level

Program level

- Program velocity, Program Predictability Measure (PPM), ROI, customer satisfaction, feature progress, PI Progress, Deployments and releases per PI, pl/release burndown by iteration, Agile Maturity Assessment at Program Level (ART level), Defect Density, % of test automation coverage, the success rate of builds

Portfolio Level: 

NPS, Team Happiness index

Different types of lean wastes

Transportation: Needless movement of work between areas of work via transport media

Inventory: More materials or information on hand than is currently required

Motion: Needless movement of people or their body parts

Non-Utilized resources: Any resource not being utilized to potential.

Waiting: Any delay between processes 

Over Processing: Adding more value to a service or a Product than customers willing to pay

Overproduction: Making more than what is required by the customer

Defects: Any aspect of the service that does not confirms to need

Lean is Applied in all the industries & functions. 

Examples of Lean Projects

-IT: Increase resource utilization by 30%

-BPO: Reduce customer hold time from 23 Secs to 13 Secs

-BPS: Reduce transaction time from 90 secs to 70 Secs

-Manufacturing: Increase line capacity by 30%

-Hospital: Increase Operation Theatre utilization by 30%

-Hospital: Reduce Surgery failure by 10%

-Restaurant: Reduce customer waiting time by 50%

-E-commerce Industry: 100% on time delivery

-Accounts: Reduce number of forms from 12 to 8

-HR dept: Recruiting lead time from 18 days to 12 days

Transportation

Needless movement of work between areas of work via transport media

Inventory

More materials or information on hand than is currently required.

Motion

Needless movement of people or their body parts

Non-Utilized resources

Any resource not being utilized to potential.

Waiting

Any delay between processes 

Over Processing

Adding more value to a service or a Product than customers willing to pay

Overproduction

Making more than what is required by the customer

Defects

Any aspect of the service that does not confirms to need.

There is 7 type of quality control tool:

1) Histogram it is used for display frequency distribution 

2) simple checksheet tool for collecting and analysing the data

3) scatter diagram used for bivariate data analysis

4) Fishbone or cause and effect diagram used to study root cause analysi 

5) Control chart used to study process how much changes occurs with time 

6) Pareto chart It displays the most significant factors on the graph 

7) The flow charts or run chart continuous monitoring of process and capturing the data in a defined interval.

SMED - SINGLE MINUTE EXCHANGE OF DIES

CAPA - CORRECTIVE AND PREVENTIVE ACTION

DFSS - DESIGN FOR SIX SIGMA

VSM - VALUE STREAM MAPPING

SIPOC - SUPPLIER INPUT PROCESS OUTPUT CUSTOMER

VOC - VOICE OF CUSTOMER

CTQ - CRITICAL TO QUALITY

JIT - JUST IN TIME

POUS - POINT OF USAGE STORAGE

COPQ - COST OF POOR QUALITY 

DOE - DESIGN OF EXPERIMENT 

a) The positional variation occurs (within the specific product)

examples are given below

Within a single unit of production (Chips on the wafer, features of a program)

by position within a batch (cavity to cavity within the mould)

by operator to operator or machine to machine 

b) Cyclical variation (between sequential products)

Batch to the batch difference (wafer to wafer)

between consecutive pieces 

Between consecutive services (short vs long cycle)

c) Temporal (Shifts over time)

Shift to shift variation

day to day

Set up to set up

What is lean 

Lean is nothing but waste reduction toll in any organisation 

It is non-value added activity, but indirectly it helps for increasing the revenue and growth of the organisation 

If waste production will be less it means defective parts are less production means non-defective products or quality percentage is increasing so lean has its importance

Six Sigma 

Six Sigma is the statistical approach for eliminating the defects in the process

it is a value-added activity 

it is a set of tools and techniques for process improvement