Thinking Lean: How to Unlock the Secrets of a Lean Life

Thinking Lean: How to Unlock the Secrets of a Lean Life
Thinking Lean: How to Unlock the Secrets of a Lean Life
Thinking Lean: How to Unlock the Secrets of a Lean Life

Thinking Lean: How to Unlock the Secrets of a Lean Life

In case you missed it, watch the recording of our latest webinar where we are joined by our guest speaker Dr Sarpkaya, a contributing faculty member for Kettering University Online and Dr. Kristine Wallace, who is our vice president for Kettering Global. In this webinar Dr Sarpkaya shares some of his knowledge on lean six sigma to help us unlock those secrets. In addition, Dr. Wallace will share some details with us about the online, Master of Science in lean manufacturing program at Kettering.

Visit the Lean Manufacturing Masters Degree program page to learn more.

Read a Transcript below:

Welcome everyone, to our webinar, Thinking Lean: How to unlock the secrets of a lean life. So, before we get started today, I have a few housekeeping items to go through. First, you should be able to see a Q and A box and the PowerPoint slides that we're reviewing today, so it should look something like what is on my screen right now. So, you can customize your view if you would like. For example, you can make the slides bigger, you can make the Q and A box smaller. If you have any questions on how to do those things, just use that Q and A box and type your question and I'll address it for you. Also, just to note, I want to make sure everyone is using Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer. Safari tends to have some issues, so if there are some of you that are on Safari, you might not be able to hear me, but you could see this. If you have any technical issues, just go ahead, type them in the Q and A box, and I will do my best to address those.

This event is being recorded for future viewing so you'll all receive a copy of this presentation that should come to you in your inbox by tomorrow. Also, for today, only the panelists are unmuted, which means you can hear us but we cannot hear you. So, again, take advantage of that Q and A box. If you've got questions, type them in the window, click submit. I'm going to track those as we go through the presentation. There's going to be time at the end for Q and A where we'll go through all of those questions. So, type them as you have them and then, we'll get back to you on them. And then, lastly, there is going to be a short survey at the end. So, it will pop up on your screen once the webinar concludes. It is an optional survey, but it would only take a minute, and it would help us understand your experience today and how we might be able to refine our sessions for the future. So, if you can, just take a minute and take that survey for us.

On to introductions. My name is Erin Brackman and I am moderating today. I am joined by two very special guests. Our featured speaker, [Dr. Gokhan Sarpkaya], who is a contributing faculty member for Kettering University online, and Dr. Kristine Wallace, who is our vice president for Kettering Global. So just a little bit more detail about our featured speaker, Dr. [Sarpkaya?]. He is a six-sigma expert who acts as a knowledge enabler, subject matter expert, and premium communicator for adult students. He teaches several courses, as you can see, n the master of science and the manufacturing curriculum at Kettering University, online. And just to give you an idea of his vast industry experience, you can see some of the positions that he has held, some of the companies that he's worked for, and just a note for you, well, this is a small sample of his extensive background. He also holds several degrees including his bachelors, masters, Ph.D., and certifications as well, not to mention he speaks five languages. So, as I'm sure you would agree, it is exciting to have Dr. [Sarpkaya?] join us today and to share his knowledge with us.

Now, on to our agenda. So, here's what we'll cover in today's webinar. Dr. [Sarpkaya?]'s going to share some of his knowledge on lean six sigma to help us unlock those secrets. In addition, Dr. [Sarpkaya?] and Dr. Wallace will share some details with us about the online, Master of Science in lean manufacturing program at Kettering. We'll have some time to talk through next steps for those of you that are interested in the program, as well as the Q and A session at the end. And now, I will hand things off to our featured speaker, Dr. [Sarpkaya?].

Well, thank you, [Erin?], for your kind words. Good afternoon, folks. My first introduction to lean and Six Sigma was during my naval career, and it was through the total quality management back in the '90s. However, my real exposure was during my first transatlantic flight when I observed a relatively small cruise serving 130 plus passengers with different culinary and dietary preferences, personalized three-course hot meals, and both alcoholic and/or non-alcoholic beverages out of a very small galley. Moreover, the crew was performing their tasks with speed, focus, and accuracy.

In 1926, Henry Ford said, "One of the most noteworthy accomplishments in keeping the price of Ford products low is the gradual shortening of the production cycle. The longer an article is in the process of manufacture and the more it is moved about, the greater is the ultimate cost." Henry Ford was one of the people who introduced the assembly line concept for Model T. Therefore, lean is all about increasing the speed of the flow, and when we say flow, what do we really mean? Well, we mean the flow of products and/or services to our customers, the flow of information between all involved parties, and most important of all, the cash flow. There's also another important component of lean. Waste elimination. And I will touch base with that concept within the next few minutes.

Six Sigma, on the other hand, focuses on eliminating or minimizing the variability. Variability is the opposite of predictability and consistency. Let's consider the cardiac surgery unit of a medical center in one of those [inaudible]. [Whether we are a?] heart patient or not, they would like to see that every open-heart surgery to be 100% successful without any variation. And again, from the same token, they want every plane to land at our home airports safely 100% all the time. In other words, uncertainty, especially when human life is at stake, is not welcome at all. Now, the real-time information availability is made possible through technological improvements. However, that caused a huge paradigm to shift not only in the markets but also in every aspects of our life. The paradigm shift in the markets exhibited itself so that suppliers, manufacturers, service providers had to quit defining the price of their products and services by maximizing their profits because now, the markets are defining their price structure by forcing them to minimize their costs. Let's take Amazon for example. When I ordered the latest and greatest gadget, I want it to be delivered at my doorstep within the next 48 hours after I placed the order. Moreover, I would like to see a photo evidence of their delivery on my cell phone. Have you ever wondered what the profit margin of Amazon is? It is a little bit over one percent for the vast majority of their products. Today, almost all blue-chip companies are applying Lean Six Sigma methodology to their operations. So, it doesn't matter whether you're a lion or a gazelle, when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.

All right, little bit more details on Lean and Six Sigma. First of all, what do we mean by waste? This is a great opportunity for me to offer you one of my trade secrets. Whether you're working in a manufacturing or service environment or whether you're trying to minimize the time when you woke up until the time you leave your house in the morning for work or whether you're trying to organize your workshop, garage, attic, or kitchen, the first thing you need to do is to detect the waste, or in other words non-value adding activites in any process. The formula is really simple. It's not rocket science. Find yourself a good vantage point, where you can observe the subject matter process and look for anything that doesn't move or that just waits.

There are several different types of wastes. First of all, defects. Defects need to be reworked, return and are sometimes scraped. The second type of waste is overproduction. Basically, producing more than needed for just in case purposes. Also, the other waste is waiting. Machines waiting, operators waiting, information waiting in the inboxes. The next type is motion. Basically, reaching out, searching for items, pure ergonomic designs of the work stations, work places. The next waste type is transportation. Well, this doesn't mean from the supplier to customer or end user, this means the waste caused by pure layout design causing additional moving of materials from one place to another, multiple hand-offs of any documents from one person to another within the same organization, etc. Next waste type is inventory. Inventory is always prone to being obsolete or damaged, also causing storage, utility, insurance costs. And more important of all, it occupies real estate. Next waste type is overprocessing. I sometimes call it goldplating. Basically, that type of waste stems from not listening to the voice of the customer, and this causes excessive cost and sometimes might be rejected by the customer. Last but not least type of waste is non-utilized talent. Basically, what I mean by that is unclear responsibilities within the organization, untrained employees, underutilized or non-utilized skills of the employees.

Okay? So, little bit more details on the Six Sigma side. In 1986, Bill Smith and Mikel Harry from Motorola developed the concept of sigma quality level as a measurement of quality, and they coined the term Six Sigma. And in 1993, Motorola trademarked the term Six Sigma. Motorola used that methodology to eliminate the quality challenges that they experienced with wireless communication devices they manufactured for the United States armed forces. Well, what is Sigma? Well, Sigma is that Greek letter representing population standard deviation, which is a statistical term. It's actually a measure of data spread or variability. On each side of the normal distribution or bell curve, Six Sigma distance from the mean covers approximately 99.9997% of the area under the curve. Well, what does that mean? Well, it means that if we don't have any defective items within six sigma distance from the mean of any of that bell curve distribution, we are operating at Six Sigma quality level. Well, what does that really mean? Well, that means that we can only have up to 3.4 defects out of 1 million opportunities. So that means only 3.4 fatalities out of 1 million open heart surgeries, right? Well, do Lean Six Sigma work against each other? No, really. On the contrary, they complement each other. They are two different toolsets and approaches of the same methodology and they serve the same purpose. And that purpose is continuous improvement. And if you're asking about the nuances between the two, they're as seen on the screen. Now, I'm going to stop here and I'm going to show you a very quick video about the efficiency that Lean Six Sigma methodology creates. Okay, now, we will be looking at a pit stop of a Ferrari F1 Formula race. But what I want you to do is to pay close attention to the time it takes to replace four tires to lift the car and to put the car back in the same position. Look at how many seconds it takes to do all that.

And you should be able to see this in your Windows Media window in the window that pops up, totally separate from the slides.

I know that I've not seen it. This is Dr. Wallace. We are waiting for it to come up.

I hope everybody was able to see the video. If not, please let me know since it's too short. I can play it again. So that's the type of efficiency we are looking at by applying Lean Six Sigma methodology to any process. If you remember earlier, I mentioned the flow, the speed of the flow. So, that's one of the benefits of Lean Six Sigma approach. Now, what is the methodology apply to it?  We call it DMAIC, and it's the acronym for define, measure, analyze, improve and control. This is a systematic problem-solving methodology that can be applied where there is a process. There are some success criteria though. First of all, DMAIC methodology requires discipline, otherwise, it won't stick. DMAIC methodology requires patience so that they can turn every rock and check underneath by going through a detailed data in root cause analysis cycles. And last but not least, elimination of perception blindness is critical. Well, what do we mean by that? Well, everyone else will into-- we've been doing this for the last 25 plus years trap, and you will end up wasting your time trying to improve premature solutions to solve their own problem. Here's another example for Six Sigma application. During the World War II, United States Navy starts a statistical analysis to optimize the armor deployment for bomber aircraft. They collect all the enemy bullet wound data on the aircraft and show them visually on the following diagram. And finally, they decide to deploy armor on all wingtips, wings and bomb elevators. Well, one statistician opposes the idea, and he suggests deploying armor on the nose engines and meat body of the aircraft and he's right. Can anyone guess why? Well, let me tell you, let me give you a hint with the Yoda quote. Torture the data long enough, confess it well. So basically, what happened was the statistician looked at the diagram and he said, "Well, this data is coming from the aircraft making home safely, despite the bullet wounds. The aircraft, the data from the aircraft that went down and couldn't make home, never made home." So basically, he opposed the idea and he suggested the opposite armor deployment decision. Now, everybody's favorite radio station is WII FM, which is basically what's in it for me. Well, there are lots of benefits for you. First of all, you will be learning about new concepts and adaptations, adoptions that that can immediately integrate into your work and life and you'll learn the new ways to be Lean Six Sigma tools to your own life and processes to reduce waste time and effort. What else? Well, it's a collaborative and dynamic environment that allows you to bring your own experiences to the classroom. So, it's not typical lecturing. It's not me or some other instructor talking about Lean Six Sigma tools and teaching you all the theory. It's basically a hands-on environment. And with that, you will get theoretical and experiential learning. What else? Well, you will be able to transform your life and make it more efficient, learn how to torture the data until the data confesses and in all the statistical knowledge that, you will be getting you will never be intimidated by data again. You will be able to reduce the perception blindness, in other words, you will be able to spot the giant elephant in the room when nobody can. Most important of all, you will be able to understand how to think instead of what to think, and you will be able to master the art of common sense. According to a salary survey performed by the American Society for Quality, you will be able to increase your salary. Typically, the average salary increase will be around 18,000 in the United States and eight grand in Canada. So, with that, I'm going to turn it over back to everyone again, and I thank you for your patience and time.

Thank you. And Christine, please feel free to chime in with me here. But I wanted to provide a couple of next steps for those of you that are interested in the online program. The next term that we have starts on April 1st. And iIknow that sounds pretty quickly but we still do have time for applications and that's something we can talk through with you individually or even during the Q&A session. And then in this powerpoint is the link to the application. Again, that will come through to you guys so that you don't have to look for that. It will be in your inbox.

Hey, Erin, I thought-- can you hear me Erin?

I can.

I thought maybe I could just give a couple of details about the program itself.

Please do. Yeah.

So, let me explain that Kettering master's degrees-- first of all, let me tell you about the Lean manufacturing degree.  We developed this program with General Motors who was really interested in taking Denning's ideas and putting them into practice. And so we actually work with GM and their experts in Lean and Six Sigma to put this program together. GM boasts that over the last decade, we have saved their organization over $30 million. So I think if we can save GM 30 million dollars, I'm sure we can do something like that for your own organization. The programs themselves, all of our MS programs except for ECE for advanced mobility are seven core courses and then you get to choose a certificate which allows you to kind of concentrate in an area. One example that people add with Lean Six Sigma is you can take a three-course supply chain certificate and then after you're finished with your degree, if you choose you can come back, and you can take a few more-- just a few more courses and you can get a second degree in supply chain management. So, there's some really nice options, ways for you to kind of customize your education. Specific qualifications, I will say this to you, if your your math and your statistics it's rather weak. I will tell you that you might want to sort of work on getting those updated a little bit. There's lots of resources that are out there for people to be able to upgrade their statistics skills. We also have a statistic [inaudible] that we have available for students. It's a six-week online course that can help get you up to your statistics level. I'm sorry it's an eight-week course that helps you get your statistics up to where they need to be and do better than this program. Also, I would tell people that one of the software programs that we use quite a bit is called Minitab. And if you're unfamiliar with Minitab, Minitab is a program that can be used for doing a statical analysis.

There is, again, a lot of resources out there, and we also have some resources to help you with that program once you're in the middle of taking classes. You don't have to attend [Katerine's?] campus as part of taking the online program, it is completely and 100% online, however, if you're close by and you would like to take advantage of some of the resources that we have on campus, you are more than welcome to do so. Also, as an online student, you're able to get a student ID. And people like to get that student's ID for a variety of reasons.  I know as a student you do get some discounts on somethings. Amazon Prime being one of those things. And so if you have a student ID that's one of the nice things that gives you a little extra, a little extra benefit.

How long does it take to take this degree? I can tell you that the average students because you're working, you have busy lives, you have families, you have other things going on, they take one class per term. We have eight stacks per year, so it's possible to finish this program up in about a year and a half. If you're somebody who needs to take four to five courses a year, and then the next year may take four to five, you could take as long as two years. But it's very possible to finish this program in about 18 months. If you're somebody who currently is not working and is trying to retool for the next job, you can actually do this full time, and consider financial aid to be able to help you get through, and you can actually finish the program in about a year. So--

And these are [some of the?] too. Also, Dr [Wells?], I think when they-- If you are interested, we can talk through those particulars of what that might look for you based on if you are working, if you aren't working, how many courses you would feel comfortable taking.

Correct.

In the survey, we'll ask a couple of questions if you want someone to contact you, but we can have an advisor that would talk about what your journey specifically would look like and other steps you would need to take in order to make that happen.

And actually, we've tried to streamline the application process as much as possible. You submit your resume. You have to submit two letters of recommendation, one has to be from a current supervisor; you submit a statement of purpose, why do you want to take this program, why at this point in your life and what is finishing this degree is going to mean to you? Those kinds of things are what you would talk about in Statement of Purpose. And then, you need to submit your transcript and they have to be official transcripts. That too is getting very easy to do these days, you can simply submit for those electronically for most organizations now, and they'll come to us electronically. So we try to make it a fairly simple process. And then, what happens is we meet as a team once a week, my admission's team does, and the admission's team will review the applications. I see somebody has a question about funding her scholarship. I can tell you that it is difficult to find actually "scholarships" for graduates' education ever. You can either use tuition reimbursement if you have a company that allows that. Or you could file a FAFSA and try to do the financial aid. And of course, you can take classes part-time. That would be one class every six to eight weeks. That would be part-time. Other questions? I see someone has to leave. Thank you very much for coming.

Dr. Wallace, could you talk a little bit more just about what the online experience is like at Kettering? So obviously, if they're close by they have the option to visit campus. But I know Kettering has a huge global component to their student base. Could you just talk a little bit more about what that experience feels like and how you set students up for success?

We do. We provide a lot of things just to set the student up for success. First and foremost, what you're going to find is that the courses use a concept called Universal navigation. And when it comes to being lean, that's one of the ways we do it. By setting up universal navigation in the classroom, you're not going from classroom to classroom wondering how that particular Professor decided to set up a classroom. Every classroom is set up exactly the same way. You will go in each week, you will have announcements, you will have video to be able to look at people giving you overviews of the courses. If there's areas that are difficult to understand in the courses, we have video that our professors and our master instructors have done, to help you through that. We have a level of support through tutoring, we have online tutoring, we have a variety of resources that are available for research in the library, and librarians that are on target to help you have a 24 seven help desk if you have any IT issues and so there's a variety of sources and supports.

And as you go through the course, you answer discussion questions every week. Those discussion questions very much relate to you taking something maybe, that you're working on right now in your current organization and applying something that we're learning and talking about for the week. And actually, putting that into the discussion board, and not only getting the feedback from your faculty but also getting the feedback from your fellow students. So, what we try to do is make sure that there is a-- It's sort of like going to class every week by having your discussion boards. And then you will have assignments in a variety of different kinds of assignments that will be available, written assignments, some are computations, some are problems that have to be solved, and then you would submit those problems.

You also have a faculty member that is available to you, responding to questions within 24 hours and has two hours of live office hours where we can actually see someone's face. So those are all very-- I think very helpful. So, we try to do everything we can, on top of putting you together with a professional advisor from day one when you're here, and you begin classes. So, if you have somebody that you need to talk to you about something going on in class, so you have some questions, or even about what is the next class that you're going to take, we try to provide what we call the gold level of service to our students. And that means you never have to register yourself. We take care of all that for you. We have conversations with you to deal with any of the issues like that, that may come up as part of taking your program. What level of mathematics competence? I would say if you have absolutely no mathematical background, you're going to have some difficulty. If you've taken what you needed to pass through, I would say at least having some understanding of basic algebra and basic calculus. I think it makes it a little easier. I will say what is even more important than that is to really understand statistics. And the more you understand statistics, the better off you're going to be in the program because there are a lot of statistical analysis that need to be done. I will say, though, having some, if you're an engineer, you're probably not going to have a problem at all. I rarely have an engineer that comes to me with an issue. If you're someone with a different kind of degree, you may want to sit down with the advisor to look at your mathematics and to see if it looks like something that you might need a little bit of help with. I will tell you that we don't have a mathematics prerequisite requirement only a statistics one. Does that answer your question? Are there other questions?

It looks like those are all the questions that are in our queue right now. But I'll open it back up. Doctor [Saraki?] or Doctor Wallace, if you have any final thoughts that you would like to offer for our attendees.

All I'm going to say is that we had our - Doctor [Saraki?] and I - had our capstone meeting last night and I will tell you that I ask three questions after the meeting is over and people send me the responses. And one of the things that I heard over and over again is how this program has changed people's lives, how it's impacted their confidence, how it's made a difference in what they know and how they use it on their job, and in some cases, how it just impacts their personal life and being able to find ways to be, I would tell you, more efficient and more effective in everything that they do. Someone asked a question about how's this program from other programs that offer a master's in lean. I think the thing that we-- there aren't a lot of programs with master's in lean first of all. I think first and foremost, you have the Kettering reputation that stands behind this program. And that we do have 550 corporate partners that we work with that many of their employees have taken these programs over the years and have contributed to making a difference for their organizations. We guarantee that we're going to do a high-quality job and that we're going to be there for you and we're going to help support you. And I think that the proof is in the pudding. If you go into our online webpage at online dot Kettering dot EDU, I think at the bottom, you can see some comments and some of the programs and in some of our videos what students say about this program in particular. And this is our most popular program and one that I think that students can say really, they've taken other classes at other places, but they praise over and over again the quality of the Kettering program. I also think marrying the lean and the six sigma together give you a real powerful one-two punch. And I think those two things together differentiate this program from other programs of its kind. Other questions?

Okay. Great. Thanks so much. And just as a reminder, there will be a quick survey that'll come out. We'd love to hear your feedback. And then an email will also be coming out soon with a copy of this presentation. It will have a few other ways to contact us as well. So, we like to make it easy for you. We know everybody, we all have limited time. So, you can schedule an appointment at your convenience, you can call us, you can email us. So, we'll make sure you have all of those pieces just to make it easy for you to ask any other questions or take any other next steps. Actually, it looks like we do have one final question.

Hi Gordon. Yeah. I will tell you I haven't gotten a lot of feedback from people saying that they've taken the exam. But I would tell you that the things you're going to on the ASQ exam that we're teaching in the classes. And so, I can't believe I - and maybe Doctor [Saraki?] can answer that more effectively - I would think this will help prepare you for that exam.

I 100% concur with Doctor Wallace. All the material I'm basically teaching all of the courses of the program in different terms. So, I can confidently tell you that yes our program is going to help you to go way over the threshold of the ASQ Black Belt Exam. That's my personal opinion.

Thank you. Erin, that looks like it.

All right. I think we've got them all. So that concludes our webinar today. And thank you again, everyone, for attending.

Thank you, everyone. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

Yes. Thank you have a wonderful day.