Carestream Contract Manufacturing continually improves its coating processes through ongoing education and training for its team. As part of this initiative, Carestream recently began offering Quality Advocate Training (QAT) for all 350 Oregon plant employees. The training provides an introduction to Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma principles, which enable employees to better understand plant practices and eliminate waste. The result is improved trial and production performance for the delivery of higher quality products to customers.
The training is offered to groups of 10 to 20 people as production schedules allow and as new employees enter the teams. Participants discuss a problem or work situation to which they want to apply new learning. Within 90 days of course completion, employees must submit Quality Advocate applications that demonstrate their ability to apply correct use of a tool exemplified in the training. To date, over 300 Carestream employees have completed the Quality Advocate Training and are certified or working on their projects.
The Lean Introduction includes an overview of “seven wastes” (transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, over-production, over-processing, and defects) and teaches participants to develop an eye for these sources of waste. The concept of value-add vs. non-value-add services is covered, as well as Kaizen, continuous improvement, the importance of standardization, and the “Big Easy” prioritization method. Transactional Lean concepts and tools are also reviewed, including root cause, Five Why’s analysis, 5S/visual management, Gemba, Morning Market, Poka-Yoke, and levels of mistake-proofing.
The Process Thinking (also called Statistical Thinking) portion of the training teaches employees to recognize that all work is a process, all processes have variation, and the need to use data to take appropriate actions and drive improvements. The Deming Funnel Experiment is demonstrated to explain the effect of reactions to common-cause variations.
Six Sigma concepts introduced in the training sessions include measures, DMAIC process, and seven basic quality tools: flow charts, fish bone, check sheets, Pareto charts, histograms, run charts, and scatter diagrams using Excel. The “see it then do it” small group approach allows employees to demonstrate that they can use the tools and get feedback if needed in a comfortable team atmosphere if needed.
Customers benefit from QAT-certified employees’ improved process understanding and elimination of waste, resulting in more competitive costs and reduced problems. Employees gain a more stable and predictable work environment, reduced waste of effort, and more time to think and improve processes. All team members with these tools are better able to detect waste, understand the company’s process, and to speak a more common Lean language with conventional factory change agents (engineers, technicians, supervisors, Kaizen team members, etc.). A resulting shift to a higher percentage of value-added work also improves job satisfaction.
An engaged, experienced and knowledgeable team is what is needed to provide competitive products as opportunities arise. This training is one way that Carestream Oregon enables its team to succeed.