What's YOUR Improvement Process: DMAIC or DBM?
Lowell Puls
Lean / OPEX Expert, Member Board Of Directors at Indiana Manufacturers Association
Do you practice DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) or is DBM (Discover, Bandage, Manage) your improvement process?
I’ve rarely met anyone in manufacturing that wasn’t terribly busy. It’s always something, shifts in demand, products to launch, capital equipment implementations, loss of control in a critical process, quality spills at a customer, revising the overall strategy, and more. Everything has a deadline, and its own inherent sense of urgency, with the biggest issues always getting most of the attention.
So it goes that typically there aren’t enough resources left over for process improvement. Far too often, instead of a logical problem-solving approach, production and maintenance issues are discovered and then bandaged, with good intentions of fixing them later. I usually refer to these as; “Things that can eat you” because while their impact is fairly low level, their accumulation over time can be corrosive or they might explode suddenly into a bigger problem. Oddly enough, they often take as much energy to manage as they would to correct.
One bit of coaching I give to all of my clients; Don’t get so busy managing and reporting that you aren’t DOING the right things for your operation. Dedicate specific resources to process improvement and set clear expectations for their deliverables. I always find that across an operation, those seemingly small lost opportunities will add up to double digit improvement potential.
Lowell Puls
President, Chautauqua Inc. Consultants
260.927.4112