Lean Six Sigma Green Belt – Six Sigma Control Phase Part 2

3. Mistake Proofing

Here you have someone who is doing skydiving. Just think about that. Midway, when he wants to open the parachute, it doesn’t open. Such a scary situation, isn’t that it’s? Extremely scary situation. Such a scary sight, isn’t it? Right? If you are doing skydiving and midway, your parachute doesn’t open up, isn’t that extremely scary situation, right?

People have ensured to decor that those kind of mistakes do not happen. Once it drops to a particular altitude, it automatically triggers on the parachute. That is mistake proofing. Look at that. This person has a device on the hand on the wrist which says that you’re dropping to a situation or to a height altitude where automatically the parachute would open up even if you do not want to do so. That is mistake proofing.

A lot let you commit suicide. Mistake proofing or Pokoyok it’s famously called as pokoyoki also is a technique for eliminating errors. I’m going to ensure or I’m going to make it impossible for you to make mistakes even if you want to. That is mistake proofing. Look at this simple example here. Switch boot has a square opening here and the plug here has round slots. These round things would not get into this. You have done a blunder instead. If I come up with this kind of a switchboard easily, you can put in that plug, right? That is called as getting rid of mistake proofing.

 Sorry. Mistake proofing. Even if you want to insert this into the square switchboard, you cannot do that, right? You can put that only into this. That’s mistake proof. I will not let you make mistakes even if you wish to. Even before we discuss more about the mistake proofing concepts and that and things like that, let us understand what is defect and what is an error.

Are they both the same or no, they are not the same. Defects are the results of the error which you make and the error is going to cause defects, right? Costs the effect error causes defect product. Mistake causes incorrect product or damaged product or incomplete product. How do I get rid of that? Let me ask you the simple question here.

You all are aware of USB slots, right? Did you ever ever undergo any training on USB? Have you done that? Universal Serial Bus. Right. USB. Have you ever undergone this training ever in your life? No, right? No. Why didn’t you undergo? Because there is no such training. Can I take this USB device and plug it into any other slot other than my USB slot?

Can I do that? I cannot do that. That is mistake proofing. I will not let you make mistake even if you want to. That is the number one control strategy that we need to be banking upon. Though it’s costly, it’s going to stay there for a longer period. The effort that you spend otherwise on the inspection others controlling that has gotten rid of.

Here is the traditional view. And here is a Six Sigma view on how to minimize the defects. So the traditional view says that people are only humans, they tend to make mistakes and inspection is necessary. That is what your traditional view about minimizing the defects is, right? What does Six Sigma say? On the contrary, many human errors can be eliminated and remaining can be reduced. The need for inspection can be reduced or eliminated altogether.

That is a six sigma view of how to minimize the defects. Here is the mistake proofing. Mistake proofing is the best control mechanism is the best known technique to control the improvements which you have brought about. There are three different categories within that. The first technique is shut down, right? In prediction or prevention.

When a mistake is about to be made, you come to know that, hey, there is a mistake which is about to happen, and the entire world is moving towards that building prediction models, data analytics, and all that detection is when a mistake or defect has been made. You come to know that, hey, there is a mistake which is done and it’s going to automatically shut down.

 If your car is overheated, it’s not going to stop. We’re going to look into the examples for each of these techniques, right? Control is another technique of mistake proofing. Errors are impossible to be made in control. Technique of mistake proofing. In detection, defective items cannot move on to the next step.

Well, this is that. Wellisky, is all these things with examples. By the way, warning is another technique of mistake proofing. With respect to your prediction or prevention, something is about to go wrong and there is a warning message which you receive and detection immediately when something goes wrong, you get to hear a warning message.

When there’s a fire, there would be a fire alarm, things like that. Look at this. Well, I like this example, right? So this is a washing machine which is also used to churn lusty, right? So look at how they’re trying to abuse this product washing machine to churn Lucy. It’s a great challenge for most of the product based companies to ensure that the product is not abused. Here, it’s getting abused.

Isn’t that people churn Lucien washing machine and start complaining that my machine has gone for a task, we need to get it repaid. Look at the amount of warranty cost or repair cost. If people come to you saying that the washing machine isn’t working as expected, they might have done something weird like this.

Next time when you drink glass sea at anyone’s, please check with them and when did they wash the clothes? Okay, here is another example. If you put a screwdriver on top of the screw and try to fix that, there are high chances that the screwdriver might slip out. However, if I provide a screw like this, there is no chance that your screwdriver is going to slip either side.

That is mistake proofing. All right. Here are the examples of shutdown for prediction or prevention, right. When a mistake is about to be made, it’s going to shut down itself. Think about the good old days when we have these cameras, right. If there was no enough light, you cannot even take the snap. You cannot even take a photograph that is shut down. All about detection. When a mistake or defect has been made, for example, when your laundry dryers reaches a particular temperature, it is going to shut down itself automatically, right? That is detection. Example here. I’m not even letting you take a photograph and then repent saying that it did not come up well. I’m not giving you an option to take a photograph if there is no sufficient light there. And then you have detection here, then you have prediction prevention for control fees.

Not sure whether you have given a close attention in the gas stations, right. The nozzle for the leaded gasoline versus the unleaded gasoline, right, is different. The nozzle is different for both of these. Say when by accident I cannot put unleaded gasoline into the leaded gasoline or I cannot put petrol into diesel vehicles or diesel into petrol vehicles, even by accident, I cannot do that. That is called as prevention. I’m preventing you from doing mistakes.

Errors are impossible to be made here. Let us look into detection. Part of that. Defective items cannot move on to the next step. If you go through this apple conveyor belt, right? This is what happens if you wish to uniseegate the good ones from the big ones, the biggest apples and the smallest apples. Based on size, it’s going to divert. So the bigger apples will get diverted to a different belt altogether. Say there are a bunch of apples which are going through our conveyor belt here.

Based on the size you die with that, right? Based on the size, you die with that. So probably the bigger apples take this route and the smaller ones take this route. There would be something here which is going to check the size and then divide the apples there. That is detection basically in the control, right. So let us move on and understand the next thing. Also, let us move on to the next slide there. The third thing is warning. This is the third part of your mistake proofing.

If you do not wear a seatbelt, it is going to give you an alert. It says, hello, you have not wore your seatbelt. You have not put on your seatbelt. That is prediction or prevention. Even before something goes wrong, the system is warning you. It’s giving you a message. And the detection is your smoke detector. If there is a fire in the house or in any place location based on the smoke, you’ll hear an alarm, fire alarm, and then you rush out, right? That is detection basically for you.

One of the benefits of mistake proofing. There is no formal training required, remember? USB device? Do you need any training to plug in your USB device into your systems? No. No formal training is required. Inspection is not required. So the effort that you spend on inspecting and performing your audits, things like that, got eliminated, right? The effort saved can be spent towards your futuristic tasks. That’s another good news. You come up with a defect free product.

 Because I’m not even letting you make a defect. I’m not letting you come up with a defect, right? I’m not giving you that opportunity. If there are no defects, obviously there wouldn’t be any rework. These are a few of the good things, right? One more thing here there is a person by name, Tal Goldsworthy, right?

He has used mistake proofing very effectively. Let me show you that. Let me show you that. Tal Goalsworthy and he’s a person who got his heart operated. Tal goalsworthy, right? And he speaks a lot about that. He’s a boiler engineer. He just knows piping and plumbing. And he underwent an interesting surgery. Heart surgery, right? And he has mistake proved that kir is an article from BBC. He’s an engineer who fixed his own heart. Sounds cool, isn’t that? He lived with a life threatening issue that was less than easy to fix. There, he has come up with a simple solution and he has implemented the mistake proofing concept. So mistake proofing is used to even save the lives of the humans. That is the power of mistake proofing. You can go through that when you find.

4. Visual Standards,Inspection / Audit

Here is a visual sign, right? This says that hey, this is a public calling office. You can call, make public calls there. This is a symbol or visual of your suggestion box. Drop in your suggestions here. This is a visual representation of the control chat. Visual community communication. I try to communicate using signs. The next thing is visuals which are used to control the mistakes. Hey, do not smoke, do not switch on the lights, right? And these are the traffic lights. These are the visual controls which are used to control the mistakes that you might accidentally tend to make. Your airports do a lot of experiments around this before they open to the general public, right? They do a lot of experiments around that. They lay a few people or they open it only for a few of the public. The airports would be open for probably celebrities and things like that. And they monitor using cameras.

They check how much time is a person spending and reaching his destination or his desired gate number to go to flight or how much time is it taking from the entry to the Arrow Bridge. Right? If it’s taking a lot of time wondering about that means your signage or visual communication or visual boats are not clear. Probably one person wants to go to a washroom and he spends ten minutes identifying, roaming here and there, checking at the boats. And finally he finds finds a washroom. Hopefully by then nothing weird happens, right? So that means the visual boats are not clear, the visual controls are not clear, the visual standards are not clear, not established. So a lot of your airports and public places, shopping malls, even before it’s open to the general public, they do these kind of testing there. Right here. Here is one such visual control. Right.

Go straight for your baggage or to get a taxi or to book a flight. Right? And these are the various gates. This area visual controls. Primarily visual control is any communication device which is used in the work environment that tells us at a glance how work should be done. How should you do the work. Probably it’s there at the work environment which is going to guide you on how the work should be done. Always it’s good to have visual control. Look at that. Before a visual control, this image looks good, but then what does that mean? Here it’s clear this is a fuel gas. There is another symbol attached here. If you have these kind of visual controls, it’s going to make your life much easier. Right?

These are production displays, your traffic signals. All these are examples of your visual control. It generally applies to information which is critical to the flow of your work. Activities such as your equipment. Safety warning is extremely important, right. It should be clearly displayed if there is any safety related issue there actions, procedures, all those should be there. Standardization can be implemented in any situation in such a way that all standards are identified by visual controls. You standardize your work using visual controls, right. Once you have visual controls, you need not even worry about directing people on what to be done, what not to be done. They take care of that. If you want to plug in your television set with your DVD set, right? You normally see these kind of slots. There would be a yellow slot, there would be probably blue slot there, and there might be another red slot for television, right? And you might have similar these kind of slots for your music system. And you just plug in red into red, blue into blue, and yellow into yellow.

That is an example of your visual control on how to standardize things, all right? Now, if that is not possible, then you reset to this technique of inspection or audit. Should this be preferred option? No, I do not think so. This should be the least preferred option, right. But sometimes we end up using inspection or audit. We end up doing that. There are three types of inspections. One is the source inspection. Inspection, which is carried out at the source location, right? If I hire a manufacturing plant for manufacturing my shoes, spurs shoes, I go there and do the inspection of the spurs shoes, which are manufactured. That is called as source inspection. Mistakes detected close to source can be reworked or corrected quickly before it is passed on to the end user.

The second inspection technique is called as informative inspection. Inspection, which is carried out to investigate the cause of any defect found so that action can be taken. Right. It also provides information about defects after it has occurred. After a defect has occurred, right. And then you have judgment inspection. Inspection, which is carried out to separate the good units from the bad units once processing has occurred. Right. It doesn’t decrease the deficit rate. It just differentiates between the good ones and the bad ones. Good and the bad. Right. Ugly is training you on this, all right?