Alan Harrison is Head of Kaizen & Continuous Improvement at Weir Pumps Ltd., a leading organization in the design, manufacture, and service of engineered pumps and fluid handling systems. He had a Black Belt training in ABB Power Transformers and then later trained and certified by Dr. Mikel Harry, the original developer of Six Sigma in the U.S.
Harrison has always believed in achieving more with less and have always challenged the way he and others approach issues; questioned systems and assumptions. He claims himself to be a pragmatic thinker. To him Lean and Six Sigma are a way of thinking and a way of going about the business. Using facts and statistics to describe and better understand real-world processes, these processes can help an organization make right improvements in a right way.
He is among those who see the benefit of combining both Lean (usually linked with the Toyota Production system) and Six Sigma methodologies. Harrison believes that both share the same core values as well as most of the improvement tools. Although Lean is driven more by production strategy, a 1-piece, pull system, flow, and Six Sigma by statistics; the two complement each other very well.
“I believe that Six Sigma, Lean, Business Process Re-engineering, Kaizen projects etc are all happening at the task level: when someone needs to do something by a specified time. The goal of any improvement approach is to define, in an effective and efficient way, what needs to be done, by whom, how, why and by when,” Harrison said.
If you are an organization therefore seeking for process improvements, you find out what your organization and customers ?crave for.? In short, listen to both your internal and external Voice of the Customer (VOC) techniques. Harrison suggested the following steps to determine which initiative(s) to take:
1. Learn about your customers? wants and values
2. Align your business purpose with those wants and values
3. Understand where you are, and where you want to be, both in absolute terms and relative to other organisations
4. Educate and align everyone within the organisation to understand where the company wants to be and key elements of that journey.
5. Translate these into practical objectives, prioritise the gaps and attack them
6. Support the right people to use the right tools at the right time to keep closing those gaps.
7. Embed 5Why?s and ?Gemba? into everyone?s behaviour. I believe that those two are like communication; you can never have enough.
8. Where are you finding the biggest potential for savings?
Six Sigma Interview with Alan Harrison, Weir Pumps Ltd
Tags
lean
process improvement
