This is the point in the Lean Six Sigma process when you formally enter the Define phase, which we cover in this and the next two chapters. In this chapter, we’ll focus on taking your prioritized project ideas and turning them into problem statements. From there, we’ll show you how to document your processes at 50,000 feet.

With these two pieces of the puzzle in place, you’ll be well on your way to understanding what needs to be done to make your desired improvements. And if you remember anything about the Define phase of Lean Six Sigma, remember this: you need to answer the question “What is broken?” If you don’t know exactly what’s broken, you can’t fix it.

The Define stage of Lean Six Sigma is when you set up your team for success in achieving your planned improvements. Since you’ve already gone through a structured process for selecting your project topic, or one has been assigned to you by a Lean Six Sigma Champion, you’re ready to jump forward. But before you do, check out this flow chart—it spells out the key steps for defining your project right the first time.

Your first task is to compose a statement that clearly defines your problem and communicates it to others. In doing this, you should meet the following criteria.

What is the problem? What is the defect? What products or processes are defective? Examples:

Where does the problem occur? What part of the product or process is “broken”? In what geographical area or facility does the problem reside? Examples:

When was the defect first observed? What is the history? Is there a pattern? Examples:

How extensive is the problem? How many products are defective? How often does the process function improperly? What is the trend? Examples:

How do you know the problem is a problem? What performance standard is missed by virtue of the problem? Examples:

Another criterion that guides your composition of a problem statement is maybe obvious, but how often do we humans miss the obvious? That criterion is why the problem is important to solve. Or what will happen if you don’t solve it? The standard answer to “why” is to determine the importance of the problem to customers and to the business.

Now you’re getting into the details of process documentation, without which you are simply lost. So please don’t take it lightly and remember this principle: if you don’t document how you do business, then you probably don’t do it very well or consistently.

You’ve heard the phrase “It is what it is.” Well, too often organizations operate by the phrase “We do what we do.” That’s just not good enough if you want to be world-class at what you do. If you want to be among the best, you will document every one of your processes, and you will use that documentation to improve what you do over time.

When we talk about improving performance, we’re always talking about improving either products or processes. That’s everything! An organization or company either makes a product or enacts a process.

Often, the latter (process) is referred to as a service or a transaction. A masseuse, for instance, follows a process when giving a massage, which some might call a service. An online brokerage company also follows a process when executing stock transactions.

Perhaps more interesting, an organization follows a process when it makes a product. In fact, that’s the only way a company can make products that consistently meet customer requirements. You have to design and follow a set process over and over again, and you have to improve that process over time.

Your best tool for beginning to document your process is the SIPOC Map, short for Suppliers-Inputs-Process-Outputs-Customers. An example is shown here; the value of the SIPOC Map is to define the boundaries of your process, and to help you make sure your project intention is not too broad or too narrow.

This is an important precept in defining Lean Six Sigma projects: you don’t want to boil the ocean and bite off more than you can chew with just one project. That’s why, often, organizations deploy many different projects just to improve one large process that spans multiple departments or functions.

When you move into the Measure phase of Lean Six Sigma, you’ll be exposed to more tools that can help you refine your project scope. Some of these include Pareto Charts, Fishbone Diagrams, Affinity Diagrams, and CT Trees. For now it’s best to stick with the SIPOC Map, as it gives you the broad definition you need to move forward in the process.

The process for completing a SIPOC Map:

After you have created your SIPOC Map, you are ready to put more details to your process steps … but not too many at this point. Right now, your main objective is to gain agreement on how the process currently operates so you know where to go to get the data you will need later as you measure the performance of your process.

You’d be surprised. Often the simple exercise of creating a high-level process causes disagreement and controversy amongst those who work in that process. This disagreement should be your clue that it’s no wonder you may be having problems. More often than not, team members who work in the process can’t even agree at first about how the process currently operates!

Think of it this way. You have some problem to solve, such as: “Equipment availability for Urgent Care is poor. Since the consolidation of services, delays caused by lack of availability have increased by 40 percent when the patient traffic has increased by only 5 percent.”

Okay, so why is this happening? If you knew the answer, you wouldn’t have a problem, and you certainly wouldn’t need Lean Six Sigma to solve it. So you create a simple process flow as part of your SIPOC activity, and this flow then gives you clues and places to look for the answer to the question “why?”

Later, in the Measure phase, you will make your Process Map more sophisticated, and you will detail it out to the next level. In other words, for every one process step of a macro process, there are usually many smaller steps within. However, even high-level Process Maps, like the one shown in the SIPOC diagram, can expose areas of obvious waste.

These are the process loops, unnecessary transportation, and rework moments that kill productivity and numb employees. Teams building process maps quickly come upon these wasteful steps and are eager to eliminate them. These “ah-ha” moments are wonderful opportunities to eliminate easy problems and challenges.

The good news is that many process problems can be solved at this stage. In fact, many quick-hit challenges can be solved in days or hours rather than weeks or months. Other challenges that become obvious during the process mapping stage will require a more focused and time-consuming approach.

When examining your current high-level process, or “the way you do business,” take time to reflect and look for what is valuable to the customer. This is a critical Lean Six Sigma concept: only those steps in the process that are absolutely necessary in providing the customer what he or she wants, and is willing to pay for, are considered to be value-added steps. Cutting a diamond, for instance, adds value to the raw stone.

In addition to the notion of value for the customer is the notion of value to the business. Therefore, such typical actions as performed in accounting, payroll, human resources, and other departments are critical to the functioning of the business. Many of these activities, still, are business-required non-value-added. This means that even if they are required by the business, their time and cost can be minimized.

Of course, non-value-added activities are any work the organization performs that does not add value. Using the cutting diamond example, any secondary cutting due to rework is non-value-added activity. The rework is certainly necessary if the job wasn’t done right the first time. But customers expect you to do it right the first time, and the business should expect this, too. Therefore, all rework is non-value-added.

In the simple example that follows, a patient arrives at a clinic and goes through eight major process steps: sign in, waiting room, small waiting room, nurse, small waiting room, doctor consult, blood test, pay bill. Then the patient leaves.

In this case, value to the patient would be sign in, doctor consult, and blood test. Value to the business would be nurse (lower labor cost to perform certain functions), sign in, and pay bill. Non-value-added to the patient and the business would be waiting room, small waiting room, and small waiting room again. (Did you see the episode of Seinfeld when Jerry sarcastically asked why he had to go from the big waiting room into the smaller waiting room?) So much waiting in so many different areas!

So what’s the point for you as you define your project? Watch first for the non-value-added categories and work on reducing their waste factor. (Remember, waiting is one of the eight types of waste.) Work on the non-value-added areas first, then move on to optimizing the value-added steps.

Another tool you can use to get a high-level view of your process is a Spaghetti Diagram, shown next. This tool comes in most handily when you are dealing with a process that entails a lot of people traffic in an office, or in a production cell. Especially when dealing with time-related problems, sometimes the creation of a Spaghetti Diagram can, in itself, enable you to solve your problem.

You’ll note in the following example that the Spaghetti Diagram visualizes the waste of transportation and motion. You start by sketching all of the equipment and places the observed item (person or thing) travels through and around. Then you simply look for redundant trips and areas where the lines cross.

In some cases, by doing this you can straighten out the process with just a little thought and effort. For example, simply relocating a supply bin or a computer terminal for data entry can greatly reduce the distance a worker has to travel. In other cases, you will need more definition and data before you can reconfigure the Flow for optimum removal of waste.

(Source: Sekine, K., and K. Arai, Kaizen for Quick Changeover, Productivity Press, 1992, p. 37.)

All of business depends on having customers who are willing to pay for what you do. At work, you might think your boss is the boss, but your boss has a boss, and her boss has a boss, and so on right up to the owners of the business. Even so, the shareholders wouldn’t hold anything of value if the company didn’t have regular customers who are willing to pay for what the company does.

In this sense, we all report to our customers, and they can help us enormously in figuring out what is important and where to focus our improvement energies. We touched on this in Chapter 6 when discussing all the sources for Lean Six Sigma projects. Now we take you a step further in looking at what is important to customers and how that “voice” can empower you to define a Lean Six Sigma project.

Essentially, you want to use various means for collecting your customers’ opinions about what you do for them. The most common means are questionnaires, surveys, focus groups, and customer complaints. A less common method, but one that can be very effective, is direct customer observation. Go and live with your customers and document their emotional responses to your product or service.

Clearly, these methods will surface all kinds of complaints, opportunities, and insights about what is important to your customers. And you should listen carefully to what they say, because they are the ones who are buying your products and services. You should also have a systematic way of organizing all your customer feedback into a framework that is actionable in the business.

In fact, there is a whole discipline around this called Quality Function Deployment (QFD). QFD is the science of systematically collecting and organizing your customers’ voice (customer requirements)—then mapping what is important to them to the way you do business (functional requirements).

In association with this discipline, you may hear the term “House of Quality,” which is a huge matrix that lists the customer requirements across the top, and the functional requirements down the side. By doing this, you gain visibility into what the business has to do to meet its customers’ requirements. Of course you can learn much more about QFD by picking up a book or text devoted entirely to that subject.

For our purposes, we turn to the Kano Model, which is an interesting way of helping you figure out what is most important to your customers. The reason this model is so powerful is because it doesn’t consider all customer requirements equal. Therefore, it helps you prioritize which requirements can catapult you to new heights of customer satisfaction (delighters), and which requirements can cause you to plunge to new lows in your customers’ eyes (dissatisfiers).

In other words, how do you know that the metric you’ve chosen, or your expected performance outcome (Y), is the best one to focus on first? In the next chapter, we’ll be looking at defining project metrics, but we don’t want to determine these metrics blindly. As with everything Lean Six Sigma, rigor and discipline are the order of the day.

As shown in the figure that follows, the Kano Model asserts that, for some customer requirements, satisfaction is proportional to the extent that the product or service is fully functional. These requirements, says Kano, are “one-dimensional.” A 20 percent improvement in functionality results in a 20 percent improvement in customer satisfaction. A 10 percent increase in response time results in a 10 percent increase in satisfaction. And so on.

The other aspect to the Kano Model—and perhaps the more important one—is that certain requirements, called “Must Be,” can only dissatisfy customers when not met, but cannot increase satisfaction when they are met. An example of this type of requirement is having coffee served hot. If the coffee is not hot, the customer will be dissatisfied. If it is hot, or very hot, the customer’s satisfaction will not go up.

Delighters, on the other hand, are requirements that when met will increase customer satisfaction in a nonproportional way. And if a delighter is not present, the customer will not be dissatisfied. An example of this type of requirement might be what you get at a Red Robin restaurant: unlimited french fries. Not having unlimited fries will not make you dissatisfied; having as many as you can eat may delight you.

In the Kano Model, “indifferent” requirements are those that don’t influence satisfaction or dissatisfaction when they are present or not. The color of the walls in a YMCA gymnasium, for instance, are probably not going to satisfy or dissatisfy the patrons. If you had to plot these types of requirements,they would fall directly on the X axis of the Kano Model. As you improve them, customer satisfaction remains the same—not affected.

So what to do with all this? For starters, know that there is a process and system you can employ to uncover the Must Be concerns of your customers, as well as their delighters and indifferences. This is important because you don’t want to focus a project on items that you might think are important but your customers find unimportant (indifferent requirements).

What you do want to focus on first are the Must Be characteristics. That’s why they’re called Must Be! Then and only then, you’ll want to shift your attention to the delighters, although often these become the subject matter of R&D projects or innovation projects. And these types of projects require another skill set we don’t cover in this book.

The Least You Need to Know