Lean and Six Sigma in daily life

This week’s article is to talk about how we can use tools like Lean and Six Sigma in our daily lives. The first paragraph will give you a brief idea on what the tools of lean and six sigma are. The following two paragraphs will cite some examples on how they can be used in your daily lives. The last paragraph will be a roundup of all that I have talked about. The concepts of lean and six sigma are heavily used by businesses to reduce waste in the form of lost productivity and lost efficiency in their processes and improve their profits. The scopes of utilization of these concepts are unlimited.

What is Lean and what is Six Sigma?
Lean is a concept developed by Toyota to minimize waste in its various forms in their manufacturing process. By waste I do not mean ‘garbage”, Waste is referred to utilization of resources without gaining any significant output. In day to day life, “waste” can be spending your money on things that you do not really need.

Six Sigma is a concept which has evolved from the theories of Statistical quality control. They were discovered by Bill Smith, an engineer in Motorola. Six Sigma merely uses the Define-Measure-Analysis-Improve-Control (DMAIC) model to generate improvement by minimizing variation. One can wonder what is this “variation” that needs to be minimized. “Variation” is merely the practice of doing thing the same things differently. For example, making one cup of tea the Indian way. My sequence of making tea has the following steps :

Pick up the tea vessel and seat it on the coil of the electric stove.
Measure out a half cup of water and half cup milk and pour it into the tea vessel.
Let the water-milk mixture heat for 5 minutes at a temperature setting of 5 on the stove.
Add one spoon of tea powder.
Let the tea boil with the water-milk mixture till you get an even brown color .(This could take 7-9 minutes)
Switch the electric stove off and pour tea into a cup by filtering through a tea filter.

Now even though I know these are the steps I would need to perform to sip a hot cup of tea , the sequence of operations and the settings used varies almost every time I make the tea. I might pour the milk before the water, might use a temperature setting of 7 if I am in a hurry. This is just human nature; we tend to vary even in repetitive tasks.

Now you might think why is that bad? My theory is if we keep things consistent and consciously try to minimize variation we will consume less resource (in terms of money, time availability) and will get better in managing our day to day lives and tackling the challenges that come our way.

How can we use these ideas in our daily lives? We are all crunched for money .So this is the main topic I will attempt to address. I will give you a few questions that I would ask you if you hired me as a Lean sigma consultant to optimize and maximize the utilization of your money.

Let us talk about money first .Money is something that is never enough. The first thing in optimizing your money utilization is knowing what your exact inflows and outflows are. As a Lean sigma consultant I would make a list of all of your inflows on one column and the outflows in the next column. In the outflows column, I would take a long heard look and classify them as Value Added, Non Value Added (Un-necessary) and Non Value added (Necessary). Value added can be things that you absolutely need to pay for like rent, groceries, cell phone bills, savings contribution, and insurance premiums. Non Value added (Necessary) can be credit card payments, other forms of loan payments etc… Non Value Added (Un-necessary) can be impulse purchases at the mall , that must have electronic item that you have been eyeing which is causing you to pay a 24.99% APR and things like that .

Once the classification process is completed .I would urge you to look long and hard at the items you have identified as Non Value Added (Un-necessary) and minimize/eliminate them. If you are able to do this you my friend have taken your first step towards greater peace of mind and less money oriented stress. This was a lean tool to identify what you have classified as Non Value Added (Un-necessary). You have to next use basic analysis to arrive at the root cause of what causes these outflows. Once you have done that you can use the DMAIC model talked about earlier to completely wipe out any future possibilities of having a recurrence of this Non Value Added (Un-necessary) outflow.

So to wrap up, this may seem like a lot of work but to let you in on a secret that is how life is “painful”. Not to get to negative but life is also about discovering and utilizing new tools to make your life easier. This is one of them tools that you can try out. I will be happy to answer any questions from the readers .It is part of my role as a Lean Six Sigma black belt to educate and spread the lean six sigma joy with what little I know.

Thank you and Happy Diwali !!

Durga Utsab 2007

Durga puja means a whole lot of different things to different people but to the Bengalis it is the single most important event of the year. From one years Pujo to next years Pujo is what defines the time period of one year for a Bengali. This week’s rant is all about the Puja and the joys and memories associated I will also will attempt to present a picture of the difference in celebrating styles in the east and the west from my perspective.

Durga Pujo is the time for giving, spreading the love and also the time when one just has a blast . Celebrating Durga Pujo in a mid sized town in West Bengal came with its share of joys and more joys. It was typically a time when exams were done, you did not have to “sit down” to study your books. It was all cricket, hanging out with friends till late at nite, spanking new clothes, the constant beat of the Dhak, the sumptuous “bhog’, no holds barred. One virtually acquired the license of doing all of the above in any order that mattered without having to report back to parents, without the stress of falling behind in the academic rat –race and without having to worry about the “return-home curfew timing” . Five-seven days of freedom unlimited. This of course included eating all of the fried food which could put the trans fat content of the popular fast food joints to shame, “pandal-hopping” which was the task of evaluating how big or small the Durga Thakur “murti” was in the neighboring rival pandals and marking the ones visited off your to-do list.

Moving west , cut that really fun time by almost 96 hours, make it all indoors no unlimited boundless space to move around, add “pandal hopping” distances of greater then 500 mile distances in between “pandals”, make most of the all time dhak sounds electronic, the big negative no time off for pujas , no friend food stalls, liability issues to worry about if any kind of game results in some form of irreversible physical transformation (read breaking the car window glass) , heavily accented mantras , no free throws of the “pushpanjali” , no complex material handling issues with lifting of the Thakurs to and fro to their assigned position in the Pandal , no wild bollywood style dancing in front of the procession to the beat of the dhak on the way to the Ganges for the immersion ceremony , no politics on who gets more “haaris” of “Bhog” during the five days of Puja. Allright allright there are positives too , we do have one day where we display all of our new clothes- a fashion show off the stage, get all the bhog and food which is close to what we get in the east , have all the adda squeeze in everything that we normally would spread over five days…. I know I am not quite making a big deal of the positives yet but I should be happy that we get to experience Puja on the opposite end of the world !!

To conclude Durga Puja has a special meaning to a Bengali and there is not quite another event in the Bengali’s life that can bring so much joy, happiness and hope .

Indians – building a global brand

Indians are from India , they are not the natural inhabitants of the Americas comprising of the North and South American continent. Just because the great explorer and discoverer Christopher Columbia made a mistake , you don’t have to live with it. India is a country located in south east Asia 60 years old in 2007 .India has 25 states , 14 recognized languages and 1.2 billion people approximately but hold on this is not the Indian section of the world almanac. The intention is to give you the reader some basic understanding before we jump down this rabbit hole.

All right now that we have created a basic understanding let me talk a little bit about the people that constitute the world’s largest democracy. In the American context we frequently come across the stereotype Indians that exist in this framework, mainly the gas station guy, the IT expert, the call center worker, the motel owners , the students who form a large percentage of the graduate schools all over the country and the most famous the head swayers…. Trust me it is really the tip of the iceberg. India is full of a diverse range of extremely talented individuals who are slowly spreading their reach not just in the US but through all the other continents of the world. Artists, lawyers, politicians, scientists you name it , we got it. One thing we do not do very well is in the world of sports . We like to think of it as when God was allocating talents , he chose to focus his energies on the section between the ears. Yes we will do your taxes, programming but physically challenging tasks are not what we specialize in. Though I do have to mention that we do take a lot of interest in games like cricket which do not require a marine level of fitness.

I believe that Indians are blessed with the gift of adaptability. Throw us into a situation and we will adjust to the environment and make it work for us. We come from a country where there is a high supply of extremely talented people so it is competition from an extremely young age . This is because of the limited capacity of our schools, colleges and other career choices , therefore it is extreme “survivor” from the word –“Go” We grow in an environment where failing is just not an option . This helps to keep our eyes on the ball at all times because we know that if we take our eyes of the ball someone else is going to catch it and run with it and we will never get a chance to run the ball for the rest of that life. Once you have lived and survived through that surviving and making anywhere else becomes less challenging. This can also lead the individual to become complacent and freefall their way to failure and depravity.

What we do not do well when we are outside India we do not bother to keep up appearances strictly from a fashion and cleanliness standpoint. In the majority of cases since we focus on important things like studies, education , careers, we end up ignoring some of the basic requirements of daily living 101 like cleanliness, fashion sense, physical appearances and fitness. I am not saying that we need to spend a fortune on makeup , hairdo’s ,fashion and haircuts but just remembering that first impressions maybe the lasting impression, it makes some sense of trying to be neat, clean and to smell good. I would recommend gel and Polo black for the guys.

That’s all I have got for starters watch for more ranting on this blog , hopefully the reader will have some return on time invested in reading.