IMPROVE STAGE

The IMPROVE in DMAIC is about redesigning the process to achieve improved capability. Prior to the Improve phase being completed, the process must be run with its updated configuration and settings. 

This phase requires realization of the KPI’s that are causing the outcome. 

The activity requires three things: 

1 - brainstorming by project owners and members whose goal is to create a solution that will address the main problem - Proposed Counter Measures from the Analyze stage,

2 - testing the solutions -Measurements Comparison,  

3 - assessing the outcome of the executed solutions - Yield calculation.

This stage will help conclude the amount and relationships of identified variables to the project Y. Most of the time before rolling-out a full-scale implementation, project owners conduct test run on a sample group. This is done to determine the finest settings. It is logical to choose the most effective setting which is also factored on the company’s resources, procedures and policies .

Proposed Counter Measures

Counter Measures which have been identified in the Analyze stage now have been assigned  to the Engineer who will look into the main Key Findings and will make necessary adjustment while investigating FMEA.
FMEA is a system for analyzing the design of a product or service system to identify potential failures, then taking steps to counteract or at least minimize the risks from those failures.
The FMEA process begins by identifying “failure modes,” the ways in which a product, service or process could fail. A project engineer examines every element of a service, starting from the inputs and working through to the output delivered to the customer. At each step, the team asks “what could go wrong here?”

 Measurements

Measurements have been collected after analyzing FMEA process. 

The results are represented below on the same graph, which represents previous months. After implementing all of the potential x's - Counter Measures, it has been established that the number of remeasures rapidly decreased, which represents great results of the project. Although, project team have finished identifying all potential causes, they still have to monitor measurement results and continue stimulation analyzes.

 

 

Assessing the outcome of the executed solutions - 
Yield calculation

In our Yield indicators we can see a significant improvement, as over the three shifts there are Yields which are indicating minimum of 96.6%. These results are satisfying, however we will be aiming to achieve Six Sigma Level of 99.99966%. 

After implementing all of the introduced changes by our team we can see improvement, now in our further steps we might assign IT member to look closely at the MicroVu software, as we are presuming that the measurement problems might also be related with something we didn't look at, as we didn't have an IT Software Developer in our team.

 

ANALYZE STAGE

 This phase is about - What does your data tell you? Is often intertwined with the Measure Phase. Our data collection team consist people who have collected  different sets of data and additional data. As the team reviewed the data collected during the Measure Phase, they have decided to adjust the data collection plan to include additional information. Then team analyzed both the data and the process to narrow down and verify the root causes of remeasures occurring at the MicroVu process.

Root Cause Analysis:

Root cause analysis (RCA) is a method of problem solving that tries to identify the root causes of faults or problems. A root cause is a cause that once removed from the problem fault sequence, prevents the final undesirable event from recurring.

Once we have the branches labeled, we began brainstorming possible causes and attached them to the appropriate branches. We have also used 5why's to support our session.

After our team's brainstorming session we have finished our fish-bone diagram to visualized all potential X's, in the next step we  further identified the key findings of potential causes. 

 

Key findings on MicroVu Process Analysis:

In our Key Findings we have distinguished three major causes of the remeasures problem and our support team will be working on improving these three effects on remeasure. A large number of potential root causes (process inputs, X) of the project problem were identified via root cause analysis. However the top 3 potential root causes were selected using multi-voting tool for further validation. 

 

The purpose of this step was to identify, validate and select root cause for elimination. A data collection plan was created and data were collected to establish the relative contribution of each root causes to the project metric, Y. This process was repeated until "valid" root causes could be identified. 

We have:

• Listed and prioritized potential causes of the problem
• Prioritized the root causes (key process inputs) to pursue in the Improve step
• Identified how the process inputs (Xs) affected the process outputs (Ys). Data was analyzed to understand the magnitude of contribution of each root cause, X, to the project metric, Y.
• Detailed process maps could also be created to help pin-point where in the process the root causes reside, and what might have been contributing to the occurrence.