10 The IE Approach
Chapter Table of Contents
Process Improvement
How does an IE create a process to reliably produce a product or service with specified requirements? While the definition of industrial engineering says “the design or improvement” of a system, most IEs are involved in improvement. The IE approach is to continually improve the system.
In Good to Great[1], Jim Collins found a focus on continuous improvement in the companies he studied: “Visionary companies focus primarily on beating themselves. Success and beating competitors comes to the visionary companies not so much as the end goal, but as a residual result of relentlessly asking the question ‘How can we improve ourselves to do better tomorrow than we did today?’ And they have asked this question day in and day out – as a disciplined way of life – in some cases for over 150 years. Nomatter how much they achieve – no matter how far in front of their competitors they pull – they never think they’ve done ‘good enough.'”
Improving the whole system at once is hard, so the IE focuses on a particular process in the production system. A process can be described as any activity or group of activities that takes an input, adds value to it, and provides an output to an internal or external customer.
Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) and Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) are two acronyms indicating the steps an IE does to improve a process in a production system.
PDCA
PDCA stands for Plan, Do, Check, and Act. The steps were developed by Shewhart and popularized by Deming; they are sometimes called the Shewhart Cycle.
- Plan – Ask and answer the following questions. What data do we have to help us plan improvements? What part of the organization should we work on next? Where do we have the biggest problems? Where do we think we can make the biggest improvement? What improvements could we make? What experiments could we do to get us data to evaluate proposed improvements? How would we analyze those data?
- Do – Carry out the planned experiments to test the various proposed improvements.
- Check – Observe the effects of the experiments. Analyze the data from the experiments. Decide which improvements, if any, should be implemented.
- Act – Reflect on what was learned. Implement the improvements that have been shown to be effective, or repeat the cycle focusing on specific improvements that show promise but need more refinement.
When you are done with PDCA, you do it again. Or, in other words, you are never done because you must practice continuous quality improvements. The American Society for Quality has a good summary of the steps and a links to a three-part webcast series that may be interesting to you.
DMAIC
DMAIC stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.
- Define – Select a process for improvement. The project champion assigns a project team and give them a project charter. Develop a preliminary process map. Use the Voice of the Customer to determine real requirements