Day 217: Selecting a Master Black Belt Project

It's been a few weeks since my last post, as I've been busy kaizen-ing with a specific internal group, our Custom Power System Engineering (CPSE) team. We mapped the top-level process flow, put it up on the wall for all to see, clarified some ownership questions, exposed some other problems. We did tackle a key problem area: improving the quality of the inputs, the customer requirements, by use of detailed checklists.

Developing the checklists was interesting, as it uncovered some hidden truths about some of the custom power systems we design & build for our customers. The big take-away was that our systems fall into two main groups: those for indoor installations and those for outdoor. The checklist for indoor systems was basically a 1-pager, but the corresponding checklist for the outdoor systems was 3 pages long. There is a lot of hidden complexity in these outdoor systems, and there had been many cases where some minor detail had been overlooked - until it was either found in production or worse, by our customer. The process had been the same regardless of indoor or outdoor - and that was a definite contributor to previous issues. The design team played a huge part in creating these checklists, and it now gives them a vehicle for capturing and resolving problematic requirements earlier than later. 


But now it's time to start focusing on my MBB project. There are so many things I could tackle here, so many options, but I think I want to focus on the CPSE group again. 

I think the Custom Power Systems value stream has a lot of waste hidden in there... 

and I think the cycle time is too long... 

and I think the material flow is all wrong...

and I think the rework and defects are too high... 

and I think that the additional revenue this team could bring in is substantial...

and I wonder if the process needs to be treated as if it were a separate business unit... with a single "general manager" responsible for the whole shebang...

So it's time to do some investigating. I need to better understand what is happening (or not) in this area. 

Stay tuned.

AMac