Six Sigma Shift Happens

WSJ article confronts the challenge of implementing Six Sigma without a continuous improvement culture. Shift happens. Which usually results in back-slide of performance. A robust control phase, in the DMAIC process, should work to sustain the achieved performance level and proactively identify shifts before its impacts the process. ...

... "one aerospace company that implemented more than 100 improvement projects, only to determine less than two years later that more than half had failed to generate lasting gains. " ...

Via Wall Street Journal: Six Sigma Failure

Lean Culture Shift

Local manufacturers benefit from the lean implementation and training assistance at Polk State College in Florida. ...

... "The intent of the grant is seed money to start a cultural shift to a LEAN manufacturing culture, said Steve Kullberg, director of operations at Florida's Natural. " ...

Via The Ledger: LEAN Program

Kaizen Costing

Indian manufacturers look to learn from Japanese management techniques, including creative approaches to cost management. ...

... "The shift has been from standard costing to kaizen costing (that is, continuous standard costing), and target costing (that is, longer term's budgetary control, meaning two or four years during the design stage). " ...

Via Hindu News: Cost Competitive Roadmap

The Next Generation Factory Uses Lean Techniques to Shift Thinking

AMD's Dr. Douglas Grose sees lean techniques as a strategic imperative to streamline the Next Generation Factory (NGF). ...

... "Building on its pioneering efforts in the adoption of Lean techniques and Automated Precision Manufacturing in semiconductor factories, AMD is joining with industry partners, including ISMI, to develop new tools and processes for further streamlining both front-end and back-end production. For example, current practice across the industry is to move wafers through the process steps in 25 wafer batches, but most of the tools can only process a few or even one wafer at a time, greatly increasing the amount of time it takes to process an entire 25 wafers, slowing the delivery to the customer and extending time-to-revenue for the manufacturer. Small Lot Manufacturing (SLM) and Single Wafer Tools (SWT) are proposed changes that would greatly improve manufacturing efficiency, but requires an industry-wide shift in thinking. Collaborating on addressing this issue and others magnifies the impact by distributing investments of time, talent and money across all the parties that ultimately benefit. " ...

Via AMD: Customer at Center of Chip Manufacturing


Related:

Rapid Prototyping, Tooling and Manufacturing: "A major break-through has been achieved in rapid manufacturing by moving from SLS to SLM. "

Rapid Manufacturing

NGMTI: "The purpose of the Next Generation Manufacturing Technology Initiative (NGMTI) is to accelerate the development and implementation of breakthrough manufacturing technologies ... "

Manufacturing - Next Generation Manufacturing: "This will require factories that can be quickly reconfigured to adapt to changing production and that can be operated by highly-motivated and skilled knowledge workers. "

Customer Centric Enterprise: "Solving the trade-off between customer centric manufacturing on the one hand (meaning high variety and fast responsiveness) and low costs, stable capacity utilization and high quality on the other necessitates incorporating systematic methodologies for manufacturing planning, process design and quality assurance in an integrated manner. "