LEAN SIX SIGMA WORLD CONFERENCE

Deploying Artificial Intelligence to Revitalize Lean Six Sigma Deployments

Presenter: Mitch Johnson, Vice President, AI Technologies, THE COLONY, Texas, USA

Keywords:Artificial Intelligence, Lean Six Sigma, Transformation

Industry: Manufacturing

Level: Intermediate

ABSTRACT

Lean Six Sigma (LSS) practitioners have long been taught to focus on the “Vital Few” … per se leveraging the Pareto Principle to identify the 20% of activities and processes creating 80% of the value.

Through the years LSS projects have been chartered with the goal of improving these highest value processes and have largely achieved admirable results. However, and as time has passed, diminishing returns have been realized through this consistent, continued focus on only the “Vital Few”. Because of this, and unfortunately in too many instances, Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) and LSS initiatives have become less relevant in many organizations … dare say even burdensome. Why is this you ask? Perhaps its because traditional LSS tools and methods … focused squarely on improving performance within only the highest priority processes (the “Vital Few” 20%) … have largely done their job. Could it be these “Vital Few” processes have become “tapped out” … and that LSS tools alone are now only marginally effective in areas where many past successes already exist? Artificial Intelligence (AI) has only recently revealed it’s possible that 80% of activities generating only 20% of the value can actually be producing 80% of the waste. It is here where AI LSS can deliver tremendous value that’s not only meaningful but sustainable. With AI analyzing 100% of activities (using all the “Dark Data”), LSS can now be focused on the greatest opportunities for waste across the organization, thus generating compelling bottom line results that have otherwise remained untapped. AI can liberate waste and inefficiency that can be transformed into greater capacity and higher productivity … all with no additional investment in manpower, equipment, or inventory … and redeployed in the following ways: • improving chronically late processes • focusing added capacity on growth processes • enabling personnel to ‘upskill’, broaden and deepen their expertise • reducing dependence on contractor backfill labor, and • shifting from a tactical focus to a more strategic focus Our presentation will focus on how the combination of AI and LSS can revitalize and perhaps even relegitimize your organization’s CPI/LSS initiatives … generating renewed excitement for CPI/ LSS by illuminating new insights and opportunities via AI-enabled pattern recognition and waste identification that simply were not possible with LSS alone.