Across the globe food prices are rising rapidly. The potential causes are many including big ticket issues like rising demand in emerging markets, oil prices, bio fuels, trade tariffs, global warming, population growth and tight supplies. With all that lot stacked-up its no wonder that prices are going up. Big problems call for big solutions and we have innovations such as GM technology and global cooperation coming to the fore.

But just how efficient is the value-chain of food production? How much waste is built into the process?

Here in the UK, a recent study by Waste & Resources Action Programme estimated that one third of food people buy is thrown away unused. The report makes incredible reading and examples of annual waste include 1.2 million sausages & 4.4 million apples. This inflates the cost of food as more has to be produced to compensate for the waste.

What kind of improvement could we get if we just ate what we bought?

Another example is the European Union’s food quality standards that specify the dimensions that fruit & vegetables must reach in order to be class one. Hence if it’s out of spec it doesn’t get through. The food is not dirty, rotten or diseased just misshapen. Luckily these rules are planned to be rolled-back as commented by an EU spokesperson, “People are saying that prices are too high, it makes no sense to be chucking food away. We want to have two classes, allowing supermarkets to sell funny shaped vegetables”. It’s just another form of waste. I have no figures on how much is lost in this part of the value-chain.

I noticed a recent example in the US election. There was talk about how to solve demand for oil and the need to start drilling offshore. Barack Obama comes in with “keep your tyres correctly inflated”. Not sure on the math but throw in cars with better mileage and I would guess its going to have an impact.

The point is it’s just the same in business; there are always the low-hanging fruit (and veg?). Start by doing the big easy wins that cut unnecessary waste. In general they are not particularly radical but can have dramatic outcomes.

In 1660 King Charles 2nd officially established the General Post Office by act of parliament. In 1840 the first adhesive stamp, the penny black, was introduced. There's a fair degree more history I skipped because I want to talk about a recent innovation.

Pricing in Proportion was launched on the poor unsuspecting customer in 2006 . This changed postage prices from being based solely on weight to being based on weight and letter dimensions. Here is the gauge that is installed at post offices to determine the price band for your letter. If your letter is more than 5mm (0.2 inch) then it costs more.

It’s a long trip to the post office and its easy to make a mistake so I tend to put extra stamps on letters to be sure it will get to the destination. What an imaginative revenue opportunity.

But it’s the rework process that really jars with me. If a letter is sent with insufficient postage it’s the recipient who is asked to pay the additional postage plus an administration fee. If you don’t pay you don’t get your letter and you have no way of knowing what you’re paying for. I wouldn’t mind too much except this happens quite regularly with the most common cause being the kid’s birthday cards with badges on the front.

This change has introduced additional complexity and to get around this people like me are regularly over-paying to avoid the risk. So the question is, “what poka-yoke device would sort this out?”

Our Lean Manufacturing program is stepping-up a gear and as part of this we are looking to present the approach to a large audience of about 200 people. And I am looking for some inspiration.

If anyone has a good ice-breaker, simulation, case study or other activity that would take about 30 minutes and engage a large audience then please let me know.

The Adam Smith Institute has set June 2nd as UK Tax Freedom Day. This means we spend more than 5 months each year working for the government. How do we spend what’s left? Our gasoline is currently £1.23 per litre (that’s $9.15 a US gallon). If you avoid the car then our train prices are the highest in Europe. The cost of living is surging with increases coming in daily across the board. Set this against a falling housing market and a credit squeeze and people are stopping or delaying spending.

Accordingly business confidence has dropped dramatically. Unless you are in a hot, experiential market, e.g. iPhone, Indiana Jones or Wii, adapting to this challenging environment of lower growth, rising prices & chasing revenue will mean an even greater focus on cash flow and controlling costs.

With high capital expenditure projects such as new IT systems unlikely to get sign-off, does this offer a great opportunity to really focus on customers, processes and removing the hidden waste? To do so immediately and relatively cheaply? To start banking benefits within weeks? To build into a full business transformation?

As price starts to rank as the top criteria for buying decisions, so businesses will need to ensure they can reduce costs and maintain quality. Now must be the time to be ramping-up & investing in the Lean Six Sigma technology.

Now I have achieved my ASQ Black Belt certification and with my brain still packed full of Lean Six Sigma information, I thought I would see if I could collect some more badges. So it’s a big “Lean Six Sigma Certification” welcome to the British Standards Institute (BSI).

My experience with BSI goes way back to my very first job as a polymer engineer and developing industrial ‘O’ rings to quality standard BS 5750 (I found the company still exists – James Walker).

Things moved on from BS 5750 and it became ISO 9000 and the ISO 9001:2000 kitemark is an international quality standard adopted by over 500,000 companies across 149 countries.

They seem a little late to market, but I think the brand and its values will bring a lot to developing our profession and giving confidence to our customers.

In our business we are passionate about achieving breakthrough innovations and I’d like to share a few examples of how we really push the envelope. Lets start with the fire alarm. It’s seldom used for real but reaches right across the whole campus with a very clear message:

“Emergency, please leave the building by the nearest exit.”

We tapped into this paradigm to alert our numerous project managers to consistently achieve the weekly status report deadline with a very clear message to instruct people wherever they are:

“Emergency, all project managers submit their status report immediately.”

Imagine the employee delight we achieved with this regular reminder, a simple but really effective change.

Or how about the “Six Sigma Results Tree” we erected in head-office? Our black belts come and randomly pick a low-hanging fruit (project opportunity) and return when complete with a green-paper leaf for each £100k saved. It goes to prove that money does grow on trees.

What about group dynamics in meetings? We reviewed the Six Thinking Hats methodology and didn’t really understand it. So what did we do? We innovated of course! We took the Six Thinking Hats’ one-dimensional concept (e.g. creativity, optimism & judgement) to the next dimension and applied the Roger Hargreaves’ management methodology. We found the Hargreaves - Mr Men approach provided a much richer set of one-dimensional characters as shown:

We started strongly with clear insights from Mr Clever and outstanding levels of quality from Mr Perfect. Things started to wobble when we found Mr Quiet hiding in the cupboard and Mr Lazy would never show up for meetings. But we had to call a halt when Mr Tickle took his role too passionately and Little Miss Sunshine made a formal HR complaint! But we did enjoy seeing them run around and around the meeting table, “Here comes Mr Tickle……Tickle Tickle Tickle”.

I could share other groundbreaking innovations but I need maintain confidentiality to retain our truly competitive edge!

In January I looked through the ASQ body of knowledge (BoK) for Black Belt and said to myself, “I know most of this stuff now”. So put in my entry and passed the Mar’08 exam. I thought I would share the experience, as I believe a number of practitioners may have looked at the ASQ exam.

Get a good foundation
I reviewed the ASQ exam a couple of years ago and concluded I did not have the experience to guarantee a pass. So waited until I had delivered the projects, trained the Black Belts and invested my spare time in learning the tools. After all this I decided I had the right foundations in place. ASQ recommend three-years work experience and that seems about right.

Find what you don’t know
Reading through the BoK and doing the sample exam I identified clear areas of weakness. Coming from a Transactional background, there were manufacturing areas I had never covered in particular around Measurement Systems and Design of Experiments.

Invest the time in preparation
I went through every section of the BoK. Be ready for set-piece questions that require calculating from equations, things like confidence intervals and probability. If you are used to having Minitab do the work, practice doing the equations. I invested in the QCI Exam CD and although I found some of the questions infuriatingly ambiguous it does help.

On the day
The exam is open book and covers 150 questions over 4 hours so it’s a bit of a slog. I found my collection of books & materials were good enough and included Six Sigma, Lean, DFSS, Statistics and quick-reference books. I found I needed to refer to all of these during the exam.

Next Steps
I found the brief review of the industry greats, Deming, Juran, Ohno &Taguchi whet my appetite and am keen to learn more. Now I have covered the BoK I am ready to move on and am looking now at understanding the big-picture stuff like strategy planning, target operating model and other related areas

Good luck if you are planning to gain ASQ, let me know if any questions.

Imagine a world in which we routinely do things Right First Time, Every Time. There would be no more rework as first time yield is 100% and no need to coach & mentor as green & black belts hit the ground running. Unfortunately it tends to be the case that in order to be Right First Time you need to Get It Wrong Lots of Times First. It’s just a people-thing, they learn from their mistakes.

But that’s where Six Sigma comes into play. Why bother getting improvements wrong when you can accurately define the key output as a function of the key inputs (DMAIC) or design new processes clearly linked to customer needs (DFSS)?

Now I have done numerous projects that require detailed technical analysis and lots of problem solving tools to get the root-cause. Extensive re-engineering follows with major IT changes. So it was nice to have a project that presented as essentially poor end-to-end process management. I have been looking forward to doing Kaizen for some time and must say it works.

The change in style is important in order to get the people involved and engaged in owning and delivering improvements to their own processes. It’s all about looking to embed the idea that they own the continual improvement of their process rather than having a project come and “Do It” to them. It’s all about getting them into the habit of wanting to improve rather than trying to get it Right First Time.

I guess it defines the difference between process improvement – highly targeted projects and continual improvement – people repeatedly improving their process?

Over my career I have taken many personality & skill tests. For example, I know my Myers Briggs Indicator Type, mapped myself across the Insight Discovery Wheel, discovered my rating on the Management Assessment of Proficiency, found the next number in the sequence, found the wrong shaped shape and generally been tested in every conceivable way. Actually I quite enjoy the tests because I have done so many I can predict what score I will get when asked to do a new one.

I like to rapidly read through the results and may say, “yes, that’s a reasonable approximation”. But I dread the HR interviewer who will explain the test scores with open questions like, “did you know you were XYZ?”. You don’t say, I must try to get my left & right brain hemispheres talking more! On one test at the start of my career I got the HR question, “did you know you are too honest?”. That threw me, but with a number of year hindsight I can see the point.

But all of this got me thinking and I once asked the question at an HR interview, “this is me, but how do I relate with people who are the complete opposite of me, the Anti-Me?”. I got given a very interesting book called Dealing with people you can’t stand.

It describes a series of annoying behaviours and the underlying reasons why the person acts the way they do. Behaviours like, The No Person, The Whiner or The Know It All. I read through it and found me in some of the behaviours and then started to understand why people act like they do. This was a great insight. Once you can see past the behaviour and understand what is important to the person you can deal with them much more effectively. Hope this helps.

Having now delivered many transactional projects I have noticed common themes repeatedly occurring. These include:

• IT Systems that have been poorly designed or operated
• Inadequately thought through policies & procedures
• Opaque, non-existent or duplicate processes
• Lack of viable information on process performance

But there is one area I would like to focus, decision points. People play a big part in the execution & success of many transactional processes. Every day, many times over, they need to rapidly assimilate a situation and make the right decision on what action to take for success.

Consider a manufacturing process; say a bottling factory continually producing 20-40% defective products. I suspect that would seem unbelievable. They may well go out of business. But in a transactional environment that kind of defect rate is not unusual and can sometime go much higher.

Take a look at a generic example, the IT Helpdesk; this front-line support team receives numerous requests each day. They review the details and forward the request to the relevant technical support team.

The core value-adding element here is to understand the issue and deliver it to the correct team. What sort of influences impact on correctly making that decision?

• Staff Training, Skills & Experience
• Policies & Procedures
• Information Available
• Incentives

Now imagine the IT Help Desk’s primary metric is based on the time taken to pass a request on. The business is looking for efficiency, do it quick…..no quicker…..no quicker than that!

So here we are at the most vital part of the process, the key point where the person is evaluating and making the decision, they are adding the value and what happens, they rapidly scan it and forward on to the most likely candidate, job done, service level hit, a new defect has been created. Into the rework loop we go, technical team A calls technical team B to see if they should have got the request, they then call technical team C to see if they will take it. Technical Team A passes the request onto Technical Team C (the hidden factory).

But it’s a balancing act between being effective and being efficient? Can’t have unlimited time the business can’t afford the cost.

Being effective means securing the right outcome, getting the request to the right team. Being efficient means securing the right outcome, with the minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort. A process that is not firstly effective can never be efficient no matter how cheap it is to run (look at Rolled Throughput Yield).

And this is why Lean & Six Sigma combines so well in a transactional environment. The Six Sigma part focuses on the root-causes for ineffectiveness it provides a wealth of tools to understand and address the vital few. The Lean part strips the waste out of inefficient processes. Does that mean you go DMAIC and include Lean or Value Stream Management and include statistics? I think its about removing the defects then speeding the process by removing the waste, but its different for every project.