Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Program

Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Program

Developing Your Competence in All Core Concepts of the Lean Six Sigma Approach from Excellence to Green Belt Level

Introduction

Six Sigma is the comprehensive business improvement strategy made famous by Organizations such as Motorola, General Electric, Honeywell and others, which has been used to generate significant improvements in business performance.

Lean, which is derived from the principles of the Toyota Production System focuses on waste reduction, maximisation of value and building a culture in which continuous improvement and excellence becomes everyone’s responsibility. Combining Lean and Six Sigma provides a powerful methodology for embedding improvement and excellence into any organisation’s core values.

Lean Six Sigma is increasingly being adopted worldwide in all industries and in both the public and private sectors.

It is a disciplined process focused on delivering near perfect products and services. It is based on a structured methodology for continuous improvement, and can be used to improve any process in any business.

This LAKESHORE ISL’ Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Program introduces participants to all of the core concepts underpinning the Lean Six Sigma approach to excellence to the Green Belt level.

In Lean Six Sigma Organizations, the Green Belts lead and contribute to the majority of improvement teams undertaking the improvement projects that will make continuous improvement through Lean Six Sigma a key element of achieving and maintaining operational excellence.

This LAKESHORE ISL training program will be provided participants with the level of knowledge and skill required to achieve accreditation at the Green Belt level.

This LAKESHORE ISL’ Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Program is a full Green Belt program and assumes no prior knowledge or qualification in Lean Six Sigma. The Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt body-of-knowledge which is usually regarded as a pre-requisite for attendance at Green Belt level is included as part of this complete end-to-end Green Belt program.

Objectives

The objectives of this LAKESHORE ISL training program are to provide participants with a:

  • Problem Solving using the DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyse-Improve-Control) process
  • Process Improvement and Process Reengineering using the DMADV (Define-Measure-Analyse-Design-Validate) process
  • Process Flow and Constraints Management (Balance and Flow) using the “Water Bucket” Method
  • Thorough understanding of measurement and key data analysis technique aimed at understanding process performance, problem solving and root cause analysis
  • Working knowledge of the Failure Modes and Effects Analysis Technique
  • The “Wrestling with Jellyfish” methodology for dealing with intangible problems
  • Statistical measurement and analysis techniques, including descriptive statistics, statistical distributions and hypothesis testing
  • A complete coverable of all Lean methods and techniques

In particular, it is expected that participants completing the Green Belt Program will be able to successfully execute and implement projects using each of the methodologies covered in the program and be able to correctly decide which is the most appropriate methodology for each situation.

Participants completing this LAKESHORE ISL training program may elect to progress further in order to achieve the more advanced Black Belt accreditation.

Training Methodology

The Lean Six Sigma Green Belt program is a hands-on, stimulating learning experience.

This LAKESHORE ISL Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Program will be highly interactive, with opportunities to advance your opinions and ideas. Participation is encouraged in a supportive environment.

To ensure the concepts introduced during the program are understood, they will be reinforced through a mix of learning methods, including lecture style presentation, open discussion, case studies, simulations and group work.

The Green Belt program is delivered by way of a 10-day workshop, supported by a team-based project showing the application of Lean Six Sigma Green Belt techniques to the workplace, upon completion of the workshop.

*Note: Some of the topics covered from day 6 onwards in this program will make use of the Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet software and the “Data Analysis Toolpak” add-in. Participants will need to bring laptops to the program with the “Toolpak” add-in installed and activated.

It has been our experience the learning value of the training experience is maximised if there are enough laptop computers available so that no more than two participants have to share a computer.

Organizational Impact

Organizations who expose participants to the training and development experience provided by this program will be contributing to building a core of knowledgeable and skilled staff who will be able to add value through their contributions as team members and team leaders for Lean Six Sigma improvement projects at an intermediate-to-advanced level.

In addition to being able to undertake more advanced projects themselves, Green Belts will be in position to lead, mentor and guide Yellow Belt Teams to ensure successful completion of projects.

Personal Impact

Becoming a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt is a tremendous personal development and potentially life changing experience.

Individuals attending this LAKESHORE ISL’ Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Program will gain knowledge and skills in key business and operational improvement methodologies, tools and techniques to an advanced level and significantly develop their measurement and data analysis skills. They will be able them to initiate, execute and deliver improvement projects for their Organizations addressing a broad range of problems including addressing intangible issues.

They will also be able to contribute to the development of Lean Six Sigma implementation strategies.

Who Should Attend?

The Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Program introduces participants to concepts, methodologies, tools and techniques on which Lean Six Sigma is based to the Green Belt level.

The Lean Six Sigma Green Belts are an organisation’s improvement leaders and implementers. They bring to project teams a depth of business experience and technical expertise in Six Sigma methodology.

The Green Belt is the key contributor and driver of the continuous improvement process at the operational level. For most – bar the toughest projects – Green Belts are the team leaders and team members on Lean Six Sigma improvement teams.

Green Belts play major supportive roles to full-time Black Belts, doing much of the data gathering, leveraging upon business knowledge and contributing ideas to accelerate problem solving within the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control) process.

The best candidates for Green Belt training are typically employees at any level who have an interest in improving the organisation. This can include:

  • Senior Managers who may wish to participant in the occasional high level project and use their knowledge of Lean Six Sigma concepts, tools and techniques to improve their understanding of the business and improve their problem solving and decision making skills
  • Middle Managers, Front Line Managers and Team Leaders who wish to define, lead and participate in improvement initiates;
  • Operational level employees who are interested in improvement and in being involved in the process of improvement.

The Lean Six Sigma skills and knowledge acquired in this program are “generic” in nature and just as applicable to manufacturing, process or service industries. In fact, a key part of the learning occurs as a result of translating the concepts covered in the program to each individual organisation’s specific context.

This LAKESHORE ISL training program challenges participants at a fundamental level to understand and manage their existing Organizations as effectively and efficiently as possible given current constraints and equips them with the tools and methodologies to improve their Organizations to achieve increasingly higher levels of performance.

Therefore, this LAKESHORE ISL’ Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Program will people working at levels of any type of organisation – public sector or private sector, manufacturing, process or services.

Program Review 

The Lean Six Sigma Green Belt program is presented as single 10 day workshop and allows time after the workshop for participants to initiative their own workplace based Lean Six Sigma application projects.

The first 5 days of this LAKESHORE ISL’ Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Program covers the content usually associated with an advanced Yellow Belt level program and builds on this during the second 5 days to cover the full Green Belt level body-of-knowledge.

Participants should be in a position where they can undertake their own workplace based Lean Six Sigma improvement project upon completion of the 10-day workshop in order to consolidate and provide practical application of the learning.

Also addressed during the second workshop are an introduction to Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) based on the DMADV framework and various Lean Thinking based concepts that complement the core Lean Six Sigma body of knowledge and that will improve the effectiveness of Green Belts in their business improvement role.

Seminar Outline

DAY 1

Introduction and Foundation Concepts

  • Introduction to Lean Six Sigma and Business Improvement Strategies
  • Process Thinking – Developing a process view of the Organisation
  • Understanding the Drivers of Cost Structure and the Cost of Quality
  • The Process Complexity Concept
  • Roles and Responsibilities

DAY 2

The DMAIC and DMADV Frameworks

  • The DMAIC Process and Tools/Techniques
    • Project Charter and Business Case
    • Customer Requirements Statement
    • Understanding the Process – Process Mapping and Analysis
    • Root Cause Analysis
    • Fishbone and Pareto Analysis, Checksheet and Potential Solution Matrix
    • DMAIC Simulation Case Study
  • The DMADV Process
    • Process Reengineering/Redesign based strategies
    • Problem-Process Matrix
    • Process Deployment Diagram
    • Lean Six Sigma and Innovation
    • DMADV Simulation Case Study

DAY 3

Measurement and Statistical Techniques

  • Data and Measurement Concepts
    • Determining what to measure
    • The Funnel Experiment
    • Understanding the measures
    • Introduction to the normal distribution and its use in Lean Six Sigma
  • Descriptive Measures
  • Understanding Variation
  • Introduction to Statistical Process Control
  • Establishing Process Capability
  • Lean Six Sigma Statistics – DPMO, Yield and Sigma Levels

DAY 4

Flow Management and Lean Work Management

  • Process and Workflow Management
  • The Flow View of Processes
  • The Water Bucket Method
    • Case Study: Smith’s Auto-Service Centre
  • Introduction to Lean
  • The 4 Rules of Lean
  • Visual Management
    • 5-S
    • Standardised work
    • Mistake Proofing
  • Kaizen

DAY 5

The Analyse Phase Techniques for Intangible Problems

Problem Solving for Intangible and Conceptual Problems

  • Affinity Diagram
  • Relationship Diagram
  • Systematic Diagram
  • Allocations Matrix

Implementation Issues

  • Leading a Lean Six Sigma Project
  • Implementing Lean Six Sigma in your organization
  • Aligning Lean Six Sigma to Company Strategy
  • Lean Six Sigma Roles and Responsibilities
  • The Senior Management Roles – Championing/Sponsoring
  • Benefits Realisation
  • The Path to Excellence
  • Conclusion and Review

DAY 6

Define Phase Detail

Define Phase Overview

Identifying Opportunities

The Three Voices of Define – Customer / Process / Business

The Voice of the Business

  • Project Selection
  • Problem Definition
  • Building and Effective Six Sigma Team
  • Developing the Project Charter
  • Building the Business Case

The Voice of the Customer

  • Understanding the Voice of the Customer
  • KANO Analysis
  • Customer Requirements Statements
  • Critical to Quality Factors

The Voice of the Process

  • SIPOC Diagram
  • Process Mapping
  • Process Blocking
  • Process Deployment Charts
  • Service Blueprinting
  • Process Flow Analysis/ Value Stream Analysis

Lean Define Techniques

  • Value Stream Mapping
  • Value Added/Non-Value Added Analysis

Define Phase Tollgate Review

Lean Measures

  • Time efficiency metrics
  • Cycle time and Takt time
  • Measuring wastes

Measure Phase Tollgate Review

DAY 7

The Analyse Phase Detail

Sources of Variation and Root Cause Analysis

  • Root Causes Analysis
  • Determining Sources of Variation (SOV)
  • Data Analysis vs. Process Analysis
  • The 5-Why’s Technique
  • Disaggregation / Stratification of Data
  • Fishbone Diagram Revisited
  • The Cause and Effect Matrix
  • Process Complexity Analysis / Failure Mapping
  • Process Deployment Chart

Sources of Variation and Root Cause Analysis

  • Root Causes Analysis
  • Determining Sources of Variation (SOV)

Structured Analytical Tools and Frameworks

  • Data Analysis vs. Process Analysis
  • The 5-Why’s Technique
  • Fishbone Diagram Revisited
  • The Cause and Effect Matrix
  • Disaggregation / Stratification of Data
  • Scatter Plots
  • Contingency Tables

Process Analysis

  • Process Complexity Analysis / Failure Mapping
  • Process Deployment Chart

Verification Tools

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis    

Analysis Phase Tollgate Review

DAY 8

The Analyse Phase Statistical Methods

  • Statistical Distributions
  • The Normal Distribution
  • The Standardised Normal Distribution
  • Z-Values and p-values
  • Sampling Distributions
  • Z-Values for Samples
  • Sample Size Determination
  • Hypothesis Testing
  • Introduction to Design of Experiments
  • The 2 Sample t-test
  • The 2-sample F-test

DAY 9

The Improve Phase Detail

Generating Potential Solutions           

  • Fishbone Diagram applied to improvement
  • Systematic Diagram applied to improvement
  • Process Improvement Checklist
  • Technology Enablement
  • Failure Modes and Effects Analysis

Solution Assessment and Selection

  • Process Modelling
  • Potential Solutions Matrix
  • Decision Matrix

Implementation Planning

  • Simulation and Piloting
  • Barriers and Aids Analysis
  • Qualitative Risk Analysis

Introduction to Design for Six Sigma  

Improve Phase Tollgate Review

DAY 10

The Control Phase Detail

Process Management Control System

  • The Process Scorecard
  • The Process Management and Control System
  • Implementing Visual Management
  • Control Phase Tollgate Review

Implementation Issues

  • Leading a Lean Six Sigma Project
  • Implementing Lean Six Sigma in your organisation
  • Making Operational Excellence through Lean Six Sigma a core organizational value
  • Aligning Lean Six Sigma to Company Strategy
  • Lean Six Sigma Roles and Responsibilities
  • The Senior Management Roles – Championing/Sponsoring
  • Benefits Realisation
  • The Path to Excellence
  • Conclusion and Review

Green Belt Project

To achieve recognition at the Lean Six Sigma Green Belt level participants will be required to submit a report detailing a team or individual project that they have undertaken, showing application of Green Belt level concepts.

The individual project option will require individual participants to form a project team in their workplace. They will act as both the team leader and team facilitator to progress the project.

Where several participants from the same organisation have attended, the same Green Belt session participants may form a team with fellow participants, nominate a team leader and undertake a group project. In the case of a group project, all team members will receive the same mark.

Regardless of project team option selected the assignment task will be to progress either a problem solving based project or a process improvement based project using the Problem Solving/Process Improvement Storyboard Process covered during the program.

Your project should show evidence of the use of concepts, methodologies, tools, techniques covered in the Green Belt program.

Project Report

The final project report is to be submitted on the due date and provide detail of progress to date. The general expectation is that the project should have been progressed at least to the recommendation stage during the time allocated.

It is suggested that the report follow the storyboard based structure in presenting what has been done. It should also specifically highlight:

  • The context. ie. some information on the organisation, the current situation, the issue, problem or process
  • The process / problem selected, why it was selected, why it is important that it be addressed / looked at
  • The objective of the project
  • The team
  • A description (supported by relevant data, calculations, analyses) of how the team went through the process improvement / problem solving methodology (Include summaries and conclusions in the report, raw data and calculations in Appendices)
  • Outcomes and conclusions of the process
  • Recommendations

In some cases, teams have been able to implement their recommendation and see results before the project report was due. If this is the case, feel free to include information about the after situation. (Even if your recommendations did not work!)

The improvement / problem solving project report should not be more than 2,500 word in length, excluding appendices.

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