Bharathwaj Vijayakumar
• Background • Experimental Method
– DMAIC application
• Lessons Learned
• Questions?
•Bluvas T-shirt Company has been manufacturing custom printed t-shirts since 1953. •Competition and reduced the profitability made the management to take a look at their process to improve their revenues. •So, they used customers as a driving force for their process improvement project.
•Using Six Sigma methodology the current process was benchmarked and improvements were made.
• The Six Sigma DMAIC Methodology was utilized for this investigation and is summarized below • Define a problem, set a goal striving for customer satisfaction and aligning business objectives. • Measure the process by collecting relevant data to realize issues and for future comparison. • Analyze to verify connection between problems and cause of problems. • Improve for the process by reducing variation, based upon the analysis. • Control the process and maintain the reduction of variation.
• To define the problem company has decided to use the VOC. • They gave 2% discount on bills to the customers who participated in survey.
Category Customer Service Sample points for further discussion On-time delivery Shirt options Friendly support Off center image Image not bright Torn Stained High Price
Product Quality
Product Price
•Company translated the VOC into CTQ
•For this conversion they asked customer to give ratings for their preferences.
•Depending on the survey the Pareto Chart was created for each three categories of the survey to visually display the customers prioritization of the CTQs.
• Identify all possible Projects for CTQs
• P1: Number of orders that are received by customers later than the promised date.
• P2: Number of orders which are shipped later than the promised date of shipping
• P3: Number of orders that are shipped later than the targeted date of shipping. • P4: Number of t-shits returned by the customers due to the image being off centered. • P5: The distance between the image center and the t-shirt center.
Prioritize and Select Project
CTQ Metric
On-time shipping
CTQ
Difference (in days) between the target ship date and the actual ship date.
Metric
Product Quality
The distance between the image center and t-shirt center for a sample number of t-shirts.
Criteria For Measurement :
CRITERIAS Performance standard
On-time Shipment Image centering
The image should be shipped before the target shipping date. The image should be centered less than 3cm from the center of the t-shirt.
In the analyze phase the team looked at all the potential sources for these two variations.
1) On-target shipment (delay in days)
• The team held a brainstorming session to list all the possible cause of variations in shipment. The following were the list of reasons. • Inventory issues: Delays due to shortage of Shirts, color, images. • Set up issues: Delays due to changes in the setup of the machine • Job scheduling issues: Delays due to Inefficiencies in scheduling jobs.
2)Image centering
• The team held a brainstorming session to list all the possible cause of variations in image centering. The following were the list of reasons.
• Operator experience: The number of years of experience of the operator. • Days past service: Number of days since the printing machine was last serviced. • Die complexity: The complexity of the image.
• The following improvement steps were taken for the two criteria's. On target shipment: 1)Standard operating procedures 2)Inventory delays 3)Job scheduling issues Image centering: 1)Days past service 2)Operator experience
In the control phase the following procedures were maintained for the two criteria's. Image Centering • To maintain a timely and proper machinery service and document the service dates along with any important information that would be helpful for future reference. • To continue training session for all new employees. Also, if needed, give educational training to existing employees. • Monitor the process data every month for the first 6 months and if under control monitor every quarter.
On-target Shipment • To monitor the SOP for all the processes very closely and document any changes in the process in a timely manner. • To audit the inventory process once every month and later proceed with once every quarter. • Continue educating employees with the use of new software. • Continue to compile and analyze data using applicable statistical tools.
• VOC can be easily achieved by giving some benefits to the customers
• Using six sigma, “process improvement” and “time management” can be done at same time.
• By maintaining SOP we can reduce tempering of the process.