[00:00:08] I got introduced to Lean Six Sigma when I was about 15 years old, when my father and his business partner started doing some White Belt videos online, which is a level of lean Six Sigma, the first level lean Six Sigma, I got introduced by doing content editing. They were making some videos and they needed someone to write the scripts. And so, I was learning about Lean Six Sigma while I was content editing. And what really piqued my interest was I was editing a video about defects and it talks about how you can have a scratch on a car and that is a defect, but it does not make the car defective. And then when you have a broken engine in the car and the car cannot go anywhere, that is when you have a defective product. So, a really piqued my interest not just because I love cars, but because I was learning about the different ways that Lean and Six Sigma applied to real life. And so really interested me. And I was 15 years old and just loved it.
[00:01:02] So about eight years ago, I was at Bellingham Technical College helping out with some of their programs there, and I decided to implement lean methodologies in five of the college’s programs. The whole goal of that was to, number one, make their labs much more efficient and eliminate the waste in their lab processes, as well as introduce the students to lean methodologies. Obviously, a student graduating with a two-year degree in say mechatronics and then having a lean certificate on top of that would make them very, very employable. So that is my first introduction to Lean. And since then, I have been very passionate about working with companies, helping them to eliminate their waste and improve their operations so they can be more profitable, grow their revenue, grow their market share, etc..
[00:02:08] OK, I got introduced to Lean Six Sigma when I was a young man in my 20s. I was working at Boeing Commercial Airplane Company in Everett, Washington, and one day we were all called out to the factory and we had this big meeting about how we need to improve quality, how we need to be more competitive with Airbus and with McDonnell Douglas. And the SVP was up on this big stand and they had this big presentation. And the next day I came into work and I got called into the office and I thought, uh oh, they are talking about quality improvement. Maybe they are going to try to get rid of some of us who are causing problems. And my boss told me that I was doing a great job. And because of that, I was going to get promoted into an organization that was our continuous improvement department. And the only thing I had to do was not make airplane parts anymore, but to make them better. So, what they did was they took us and put about 12 of us into a big room. And for about two months, they taught us all of these tools and techniques on lean manufacturing, Six Sigma defect identification, data collection, statistical process control, which I had no idea what that even was. And after about two months, my job was to go back out into the factory and work with some of the nine hundred people out there and help them understand and begin to implement process mapping, data collection, time studies, identifying defects, everything you basically see in an airplane that we could install. And we started applying lean Six Sigma methodologies two years ago.
[00:03:57] So that is a good question, the value of lean Six Sigma is truly in the benefit of lean and Six Sigma. Lean is all about reducing waste in your processes where a Six Sigma is all about reducing variation. So, you really get the benefit by applying it and understanding it. So, a cool example about lean is when you say you have a printer and an office, and you have a three-story office. So, depending on where you place that printer, depends on how far certain employees have their walk to that printer. So, if you have someone on the third floor, on the printers, on the first floor, we are spending a lot of motion waste traveling up and down those stairs, up and down the elevator to access that printer. So, a quick solution of that would be put the printer in a centrally located area and that would really help reduce motion waste for Six Sigma. It is all about eliminating variation. So, say you are making shoes. And of every 400 shoes you make, about 40 have the laces on the wrong spot. So, with Six Sigma, we go in there and study with our Six Sigma tools how to reduce that variation and make sure you are making the same shoe every single time you are hitting that same target, all the Lace holes in the same. And you really want to get four hundred out of four hundred shoes good for your customer.
[00:05:07] The value of lean Six Sigma is very obvious. Number one, lean is about eliminating waste. There is about eight waste in the lean methodologies. So, eliminating those wastes obviously will eliminate expenses that will make operations much more optimize, taking less time to build products, provide services. So lean methodologies are critical to optimizing any operation it can be from manufacturing to an office to actually your home. You can apply the lean principles to your home activities. So lean is very, very easy to implement and very effective.
[00:05:53] So I think the value of lean Six Sigma, everybody talks about eliminating waste. Everybody talks about reducing variation. But I think the value of Lean Six Sigma really focuses in on customers, really focuses in on people within an organization who can begin to implement these methodologies and these tools and reengineer processes and make a better way of life for themselves internally at work and also meeting their customers’ needs and expectations or exceeding those needs and expectations. So, the value is really integrating this methodology into organizations. So, you can help your communities, you could help businesses, you can help organizations begin to thrive and to begin to change the way they do business and to begin to come out of any kind of situation better and becoming innovative, not just reducing variation in waste, but taking the next leap so you can be sustainable in a changing, competitive environment. So that is what I like about Lean and Six Sigma methodology.
[00:07:06] So I practice lean Six Sigma for you, for our community, Lean and Six Sigma only has its benefits, like I said, when it is applied and understanding those benefits and how to create sustainability for communities is truly why I do what I do. You know, being an entrepreneur, it is you have to have that spirit and you have to have the grit to always be working and finding solutions and trying to find new ways to help people. And I realize that Lean Six Sigma was a great catalyst to help people very well. When you are able to give people their time back, they are able to do things they want their time. When you are able to get employee morale up, they are able to have smooth workdays and there is this many, many benefits all around with Lean and Six Sigma. So, eliminating waste in someone’s day is not only something that can be applied at work, but it can be applied at home. And reducing variation helps people have reliability. And those two things, simplicity of lean and reliability of Six Sigma creates a very, very happy environment. And I want to share that. So, when I learned about Lean Six Sigma and start applying it in my own life, you know, that light bulb went off at Eureka moment. And I said, you know what? Being able to share this with other people, that is going to make a big difference. So that is why I do this.
[00:08:23] I practice Lean Six Sigma for one simple reason, and that is I love helping others and by being a consultant for Lean Six Sigma, I get to go in and work with any organization and the people in that organization to optimize their business. And helping people optimize their business gives me the greatest job satisfaction because it is so much fun to see an organization go from having some pain points that they are dealing with, to eliminating those pain points and optimizing their operations. So that is the primary reason I am a consultant for Lean Six Sigma is because I simply love helping other people.
[00:09:14] Why do I practice Lean Six Sigma? I love practicing Lean Six Sigma. Lean Six Sigma has been around for many, many years and it helps organizations and people become more innovative, grow their careers, think out of the box. And I love going in and working with organizations that cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel. And when we come in there and we help them identify areas of opportunity, empower them to make positive changes, focusing on their internal customers, their external customers, I just love to see that evolving change within organizations and I love being part of that. I have worked in many different organizations from mom-and-pop processes to multinational global companies and to go in there and help anybody with any kind of a problem, figure it out, identify the root cause, move to the next level, and sustain that for the long term. That is one of the great things that I like about doing this.
