My session notes (IW Best Plants Conference)

Jaime Villafuerte at 2012 IW Best Plants Conference in Indianapolis, IN

How to Make 100,000+ Problem Solvers? 

Structured Education is key.

1. Create an organization structure
2. Define education road-map
3. Deploy the structure starting with middle management
4. Show results
5. Extend the training up (Champion) and down (Shopfloor) and deeper (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Black Belt)
6. Make all Operations Managers Black Belt Certified

    Key Takeaways:

• Make it an Enterprise Initiative
• Visible commitment of the executive team
• Educate, empower and involve employees
• Flexible Structure
• Communicate, show results and continuously improve
• Recognize and celebrate successes

Speaker at the 2012 IW Best Plants Conference

'The Making of 100,000+ Problem Solvers: Jabil's Lean Six Sigma Body of Knowledge'
2012 IndustryWeek Best Plants Conference in Indianapolis, IN.
Wednesday, April 25 - 10:00am - 11:00am
Jaime Villafuerte, Lean Six Sigma Director - Jabil, Inc.
Session: Workforce Management & development - for attendees seeking strategies to build a better workforce. Topics include leadership, employee empowerment and safety.

Education is a foundation for success at electronic solutions provider Jabil. Jabil's mission is to develop a capable workforce of exceptional people focused on continuous process improvement. At the heart of this development cycle is the Jabil Lean Six Sigma Body of Knowledge, which focuses on lean awareness and problem solving. Certified employees become coaches and mentors to those learning to apply their classroom knowledge in a project-based learning environment.

This session discusses Jabil's successes in instilling a Lean Six Sigma culture through a comprehensive education and development program, combined with executive management support. It also shares valuable lessons learned from an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to implement lean.

Key Takeaways:

• Gain insights on deploying Lean Six Sigma across a large organization.
• Learn details of Jabil's three knowledge levels -- bronze, silver and gold -- and how certification in these levels assures the work force is truly grasping lean concepts in practical ways.
• Hear about the importance of mentoring and coaching, and support from all levels of the organization.

Jabil, a Company with 100,000 Problem-Solvers

This article points out how Jabil has increased cost savings by 323% with over 20,000 Lean projects since April 2011. In 2010, the Jabil Lean Six Sigma certification program was launched globally with the philosophy that the Lean Six Sigma approach at Jabil is fundamentally different from competitors. Jabil’s philosophy is simple – “make each Jabil employee a problem solver, a very effective one”.  Read full article.

“Our relentless efforts to train everyone in our organization in Lean Six Sigma, from our top management to our front-operator in each of our sites around the world is the key to successful projects, millions of dollars savings and quality improvements.”                                                                                                              Jaime Villafuerte

Creating a Company with 100,000 Problem-Solvers (April 16, 2012). Jabil Blog: Aim Higher. Retrieved from http://blogs.jabil.com/creating-a-company-with-100000-problem-solvers/

Save the date!

2012 IW Best Plants Conference

When: April 23-25

Where: Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis, IN

"The IndustryWeek Best Plants Conference has been the premier advocate for continuous improvement and operational excellence since 1993. The Conference includes keynote speakers, plant tours, multiple tracks, general sessions, IW Best Plants panel discussions and the IW Best Plants awards ceremony."  IW Best Plants Website

The Making of 100,000+ Problem Solvers: Jabil's Lean Six Sigma Body of Knowledge

Speaker: Jaime Villafuerte, Lean Six Sigma Director -Jabil, Inc.

Education is a foundation for success at electronic solutions provider Jabil. Jabil's mission is to develop a capable workforce of exceptional people focused on continuous process improvement. At the heart of this development cycle is the Jabil Lean Six Sigma Body of Knowledge, which focuses on lean awareness and problem solving. Certified employees become coaches and mentors to those learning to apply their classroom knowledge in a project-based learning environment.

This session discusses Jabil's successes in instilling a Lean Six Sigma culture through a comprehensive education and development program, combined with executive management support. It also shares valuable lessons learned from an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to implement lean.

Key Takeaways:

• Gain insights on deploying Lean Six Sigma across a large organization.
• Learn details of Jabil's three knowledge levels -- bronze, silver and gold -- and how certification in these levels assures the work force is truly grasping lean concepts in practical ways.
• Hear about the importance of mentoring and coaching, and support from all levels of the organization.
  
  
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Giving Kaizen Away: "Kaizen is the plants' business, not corporate"

One of the most common mistakes when lean six sigma initiatives are launched is that kaizen, and its cousin, kaizen events become ‘corporate business’ instead of the plants’ business. Corporate lean six sigma initiatives usually start with a team experts visiting sites to DO kaizen instead of TEACHING kaizen. I have seen and I have been one of the well-intentioned corporate LSS or CI experts routed to plants around the world to identify projects, set priorities and push kaizen with great success at first. Improvements are visible and waste is eliminated. What is wrong with this approach? While it can work based on the tenacity and leverage you could gain from corporate; at the end, kaizen does not stick and die out very soon after. How many of us have seen, when visiting plants within your corporations, storyboards with to-do lists that were never completed or old value stream maps never updated after the corporate kaizen event set to create them? They are reminders that the command and control kaizen approach led by experts to solve problems would face initial success, but failing to create a permanent transformation. What alternatives do we have? Consider to give kaizen away. As the old saying “give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for his lifetime”, teach the plants to run their own kaizen event. Measure your success by the participation and learning of the local team not only by the results. Let the local team leaders to lead the kaizen event stead of you. Push for experimentation by the local leaders and, most important, be a coach not a player. As a coach your job is to give kaizen away not to do kaizen.

Result-oriented people: virtue or flaw?

A couple of days ago I was asked to review a very impressive resume for an open position in LSS that called my attention. In the very sentence of the self-description section of the resume, the candidate described himself as “result-oriented” person. Is result-oriented a virtue? What about “process-oriented”? How does a result-oriented or process-oriented person fit within a lean six sigma transformation?

Results counts and at the end, they are the only thing that counts. For instance, most of us are in business corporations, and businesses are here to make money. And we make money when we get good results: good products, at the lowest cost and when the customers need them. However, the difference here is about how we get to these expected results. In other words, what processes do we use to get results?

Results are the outcome of a process. In lean six sigma, we aim to get good results from a controlled process, because they will be repeatable. That is why the Toyota Production System (TPS) is “process-focus” not result-focus. On the other hand, a result-focus approach or person might not care how the results are achieved as long they are achieved. We can get good results from uncontrolled process if we work harder (e.g. more hours working, more pressure to our teams, more resources for inspections, check and others) and have some luck, but the truth is that this is not a sustainable option. In fact, I had my fare share of firefighting corporate battles in which I was routed to sites that were a “disaster” in order to fix problems. Bad results from uncontrolled process simply mean that we are not doing our jobs and, paraphrasing Albert Einstein, ‘insanity' is to expect different results from doing the same thing over again.

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” 
― Albert Einstein