Lean Six Sigma Problem Solving

The length should be between 8-10 pages (double space, Time New Roman 12) 13-15 pages for graduate students, excluding cover pages, contents, and appendices (if any). I would expect a minimum of 8 bibliographic sources from reliable journal, magazine, textbook, book, and websites. Citations should be formatted in accordance with the APA Style, 6th edition.

Student will select a specific problem from any industry (food, retail, construction, airline, department store, manufacturing, healthcare, government, education, service, consulting, …) that you’re interested to work on, then applied the quality tools, techniques, and methods learned to solve the problem. The paper should include the following items:

• Executive Summary
• Introduction

Table of Contents

• General information: type of industry, company’s name, product/services, organization size (number of workers/employees), and so on.
• Selected Problem: explain the problems and involved personal/process/department, provide some background of the problem (if any).
• Solutions to the problem: develop a process/program to solve your selected problem. The proposed solutions can be only one, or two, or three options. The items that should be explained in details in your paper include:

 Goal/objective, what you determine to do…

 Tools/techniques/systems are used in the process, explain in details (texts, images, chart, graph, table,…) of your design.

 Performance measurement, how you measure the performance of your proposed solution, what criteria used in the evaluation.

 Required resources for your proposed solution to be successful (e.g. how much it costs, number of workers, software/application, worker training program,…)

• Summary and Conclusion
• References

Some samples of specific problem:

Airline industry— Over the years, airlines have been trying to reduce the number of lost bags.

Healthcare — customer complaints about waiting too long in a U.S. emergency room.

Telecommunication – customer complaints and warranty claim concerning the poor quality of cell phones.

A highway route through a small town has had an increase in traffic accidents in recent years.

In the past few years, an earthquake and a tsunami killed numerous people and destroyed homes and facilities. How can water, food, medicine, relief workers, another critical supplies be brought to an area where much of the infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed?

Manufacturing – a plastic die casting company has increasing numbers of the defect rate of the parts (acceptance is based on a visual inspection of the parts for appearance.)

Lately, the company experienced the on-time delivery problems. There commonly is a failure to have the right entities at the customer at the right time.

The healthcare unit has a problem on a broken measurement system. A key measurement system used to judge process performance exhibits high variation and is thus ineffective.

The orange juice company has a problem on process inventory too high. The inventory in the process whether standard work-in-process or unplanned, is too high.

Note: To identify a problem and solution, you should understand the definition of ‘problem’ and ‘solution’. A Problem is a situation in which what exists does not match what is desired, or put another way, there is a discrepancy between the current state of affairs and the one desired. Problem solving in a total quality setting is not about putting out fires. It is about continual improvement. There are tools and models that can be used in problem solving.

The suggested website present sample of actual business with their problems/solutions. These organizations applied quality principles, Lean and Six Sigma tools in their practices, including manufacturing, healthcare, education, services,…

1) Air Academe Associates, the website is located at

http://www.airacad.com/htmlviewer/documents.aspx?i=Case Studies

2) Baldrige Performance Excellence – award recipients. There are number of good samples from different sectors; manufacturing, healthcare, education, …  Here is an example in manufacturing sector.