Waste Not, Want Not

For Alvin Griffin, director of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools' Graphic Production Center, numbers don't lie.

So when the opportunity arose for Griffin and a group of Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools staff members to get trained by North Carolina State University professors on how to implement a Lean Six Sigma philosophy, he jumped at the chance to improve his in-plant's efficiency and save money for the district.

Lean Six Sigma is commonly defined as a synergized managerial concept that results in the elimination of seven kinds of waste, classified as Defects, Overproduction, Transportation, Waiting, Inventory, Motion and Over-Processing. It involves producing goods and services at a rate of 3.4 defects per million opportunities.

"We are all about having a continuous improvement philosophy here, and we measure everything that we do," Griffin says.

The training for Lean Six Sigma is provided through a belt-based system, similar to karate. The belt levels are designated as White Belts, Yellow Belts, Green Belts, Black Belts and Master Black Belts.

The first step was for Griffin to figure out what type of Lean Six Sigma project would be most beneficial for his Charlotte, N.C., shop. Then the college professors would tell him if it was something that could be certified.

"The cool thing about the whole Six Sigma Green Belt process is that, as you are working towards these projects, you don't know the answers," Griffin contends. "We knew we had issues because a lot of waste was going out in the recycling bins. So we proposed to them what we would like to take a look at, and we went through applying the procedures."

The in-plant created a problem statement, which read: "Within our operations' printing process, we have observed a substantial amount of non-value added product being generated. Approximately 326,000 marked and damaged unmarked sheets are being removed every 60 days, resulting in lost revenue of X dollars per year."

The shop then applied what is referred to as the DMAIC (Define Measure Analyze Improve Control) process, using tollgates along the way to serve as a checklist for completion. The shop was able to identify four major categories of waste (Machine, Personnel, Overages and Challenged Design) by sorting through its recycling containers.

Sorting the Waste

To understand exactly how this waste was being generated, Griffin created standard operating procedures for sorting paper waste into these four categories. Then he trained the staff on sorting procedures, including which type of waste went into which containers. The containers were labeled and placed strategically throughout the shop. The paper was then weighed to see how much paper waste the shop was generating.

"We needed to get buy-in from the employees without them thinking that we were micro-managing them and watching every sheet of paper they were printing or were throwing away," Griffin admits. "One of the first sessions we had with all of the employees, we told them we were not going to play the blame game. We needed to get past who was putting things into the recycling bins: we just want to know why it was going in there. Then maybe there is an opportunity for us to improve what it is that we are doing."

Help getting started with a Lean Six Sigma project is available through a variety of sources, including equipment manufacturer Xerox Corp. (See sidebar.) As a customer, Griffin was offered assistance and guidance on his Lean Six Sigma project through Xerox. However, Griffin didn't want Xerox, as a stakeholder in the results of the project, to influence the results.

"So we told them thanks but no thanks," he recalls. "We wanted to see how the math turned out, and if it turned out to be equipment or human issues."

Surprising Results

After a year of crunching the numbers and carefully watching the shop's processes, Griffin admits he was a little surprised at the results.

"When we looked at the data, we were our biggest enemy," Griffin reveals. "We had leading-edge equipment and it was running fast. We thought we were going to show Xerox or Toshiba something about what's wrong with their equipment. As it turned out, it was us. The biggest waste factor was the human side."

Griffin was able to apply the average cost per copy charged back to the customers towards a potential value for the shop's waste. Eighty-five percent of the sheets were 20-pound white paper.

The resulting lost revenue added up to $72,000 per year. The in-plant was able to reduce its paper waste by 90 percent, resulting in potential additional revenue of $64,000 annually.

"That doesn't sound like a lot of money, but $72,000 of waste is still value," Griffin contends, pointing out that it equates to the yearly salary of two in-plant employees.

Griffin, who gave a presentation about his in-plant's Lean Six Sigma success at last year's IPMA conference, notes that this waste reduction project will never go away. As new equipment comes in, the in-plant will continue to measure waste and try to continuously improve its numbers.

"We weren't sloppy—far from it," Griffin contends. "But we did find some room for continuous improvement. And this is something we are reporting every quarter, and it gets pushed upstream to the powers that be."

Griffin now wants to take on another Lean Six Sigma project, possibly looking at the shop's sales figures.

"It's probably the hardest thing that I have ever done from a management point of view," Griffin says of his first Lean Six Sigma project. "But at the end you have the opportunity for a huge celebration."