Hello again, this is a short section of an example; Six Sigma project.

Again, before we start the course,

just to give you a flavor of what we mean by Six Sigma projects. And we've discussed now, the DMAIC
process improvement cycle in detail and you've looked at the Six Sigma roadmap and the problem-
solving strategy, used in Six Sigma. We're here again, we have the letter Y representing the outputs, the
critical to quality parameters and X is then the influencing parameters, the parameters that influence or
affect the 'Y's, things in the process, that will then change our critical to quality parameters. Now, before
we start looking at how to calculate yield and process capability and looking at the statistics, we're going
to run through this simple example. So let's say you would like to start your own peanut roosting
business, where you're going to sell packages of roasted peanuts to supermarkets and gas stations, for
example. Well, you've looked on the internet, how to start a peanut roasting business and you've bought
the equipment and you've started roasting and started making some sales to customers. And you can
map your basic process flow as follows - first is the step, decorating; this is basically when you're taking
off the shells and you can do this with a machine or just by hand. And then of course, you would wash
the peanuts, so you would remove the shells or any dirt or any dust and then of course roasting. So
roasting needs to be done at a 150 to 180 degrees Celsius, and they must be peanuts. You must make
sure they're evenly cooked, you don't want to have them turn black, you don't want them too burned.
And it's also important here, the longer and slower that you do your roasting, the more flavor you'll
have. And also, the next step would be the peeling, so this is then to get rid of this red sort of skin from
the peanut. And then, you would do the salting and actually, salting is fairly complicated but, let's just
say we're going to sprinkle salt over our roasted peanuts, and at that point you're done and you can
package them up. So this is important, you want to put them into your pouches, that they're airtight you
want to make sure there's no moisture and so that you can then sell them, and they would have a long
shelf life. So now, starting our DMAIC cycle, what are our customer expectations? what does our
customer expect? what are the critical to quality output parameters? And you could say something
important is a taste of the peanuts, the the appearance. I want to have black peanuts, you want them to
be crispy, so not soggy with the price to be reasonable, for example critical in parameters. And now,
we're going to consider potential Six Sigma projects, for your business and you can think of different
areas. So for cost reduction for example, we could talk about reducing waste maybe, we have waste
during this decorating, when we're taking off the shells we're actually throwing away some portion of
our good peanuts. You could maybe save time with a roasting, so that you could produce more quickly
then you could sell more of and you know lower the price for example, roasting. We learned also though,
the time affects the flavor. You could employ and try improving the peanut color or the peanut taste.
Again those are both to do with roasting for example. We also learned that having crispy not soggy
peanuts is important, so you would look at these projects, you would evaluate the potential savings in
each of these projects, and what we're going to pick here is that, we found out that reducing the
moisture content would generate for you, the most savings just for this example. So your critical to
quality parameter is the moisture content in each or in a package. You have a set unit that you're
measuring and so, I mean the savings what could that be well anytime a customer gets soggy peanuts,
they're going to send them back and that's going to cause you maybe loss of that customer. If you caught
the problem at some soggy peanuts before they were actually packaged, then maybe you could do some
rework roast again, but this might affect the taste as well, as your time and capacity, so but you've come
up with this some project. And now, you're going to build your team, your project team, so um you start
then by measuring your critical to quality parameter, here the level of moisture and we want to
understand for example, the average level of moisture and the variability of the moisture per packet. So
we're going to design a sampling plan, and take our measurements and we also have set ourselves a limit
here. We don't want our moisture in our packet to be greater than 1%, again this is an example. So now,
next step in measure we need to go into the process in more detail. Again this is our overall process but,
in each of these steps we have specific machines we're using, we have specific times that we're using,
specific temperatures for example, and here was the 150 to 180 degrees. We have operators maybe, it's
just us but we have definite parameters that we are looking at, and we want to look more carefully at
our process to find these X influencers because, we have Y is a function of X, the critical to quality
parameters are function of our input parameters. Now, in your business you might be the only operator
there, but in order to get into a more detailed process map, you would talk to the people on the floor,
you would visit the production, you would talk to experts. If you're this just your kitchen and you with
the peanuts, maybe you would talk to the equipment manufacturers, you would look at what other
options are out there and learn about the process and then of course, you measure your influencing
parameters for your process. In analyze, we're going to be formulating causal hypothesis, so what
happens if we change an X parameter? what happens to our Y? We're going to be then identifying from
all our possible factors, that key factors the critical few that will affect our moisture percent. And we're
going to prioritize then different improvement projects, that we think of and perform experiments to
test our hypotheses. And so, the idea then is once we've come up with an improvement plan, that will
definitely reduce our moisture, we will implement this new process and we want to be able to measure
it again to show that we've reduced for example, from this wide variability that we had before, where we
have here too much moisture to a much reduce. So, this is that, this is the new here and here's the old
moisture distribution. Here, we have outside of our 1% level still too much moisture, but a very very
small percentage of our overall production, now that we've improved our process. And then, we want to
control this, so this is the last part of a Six Sigma project we want to implement in a control plan. And
this is usually with statistical process control, here's an example of a control chart, which is in our second
course of course, and that we would have then our control plan, come up with a response plan. What
happens if there's some issue in the future, in the line and then finally congratulate your team. So
maybe, it's you, you've reduced your moisture content you know that you have no more problem with
soggy peanuts, so you give yourself a pat on the back and look to the next project that you can work on,
to improve your process again.