Six Sigma in Aviation Considerations
SofemaOnline considers the role of Six Sigma in Aircraft OPS & Maintenance
General Terms
Total Quality Management (TQM)
TQM is a comprehensive set of management practices and tools with the primary focus on meeting or exceeding customer requirements. The emphasis is on process measurement and controls that seek to involve all employees in process improvement.
ISO 9000
ISO 9000 is a set of standards intended to organize for producing high-quality goods.
Each company that is certified as ISO 9000 is required to ensure they remain compliant with a set of quality standards.
Balanced Scorecard:
A method of ensuring business processes align with the vision and strategy of the organization. Focuses on improving communications and monitoring organizational performance against strategic goals.
Six Sigma
“Six Sigma can be defined as a methodology that uses organizational tools with an objective to improve the capability of their business processes.”
Benchmarking:
Benchmarking is defined as a strategy for improving the organization by adopting applicable best practices of industry leaders to identify what it does well and not so well and to implement best practice processes to achieve improved performance levels.
Re-Engineering:
Identified as a methodology for reducing unnecessary layers of supervision and management.
Senior management would essentially “start over” re-building with fewer staff focused on processes rather than along functional lines.
Introduction to Six Sigma
Six - Sigma is essentially a data-driven management process that seeks to improve quality by identifying the number of defects across the business process and systematically eliminating all defects until they approach zero (or as close as possible).
Six Sigma requires a management environment that supports initiatives to understand the discrepancies and develop mitigations as a business strategy.
Six Sigma promotes DMAIC as a viable business approach to problem-solving:
Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.
The term Six Sigma is used to indicate whether the quality of a particular process is within a limit of ±6s from the centerline. The Greek letter sigma (Σ) is used to denote the standard deviation from the mean.
Why Consider Implementing Six Sigma?
Potential Benefits of Implementing Six Sigma within your Organisation includes the following:
a) Increase performance across the business
b) Improve Quality Control Effectiveness (process variation)
c) Reduced Defects in Product
d) Improve Profit
e) Improve the moral of employees
Supporters of Six Sigma claims that its benefits include:
a) Process cost reduction
b) Cycle-time improvement
c) Reduced wastage of materials
d) A deeper understanding of customer requirements & increased customer satisfaction
e) More reliable products and services
Delivering Six Sigma Methodology
After collecting the required data statistics are analyzed to develop a baseline sigma.
The two most important tools developed to aid continuous process improvement are:
○ PDCA Cycle
PDCA is a repetitive problem-solving loop that is the basis for nearly all continuous process improvement approaches, especially in Lean manufacturing.
○ Control Charts
Also referred to as Shewhart control charts which have become the basis of statistical process control (SPC).
Case Study - Six Sigma Forerunner Toyota Production System
The Toyota Production System became a forerunner of “Lean” manufacturing, with the system focused on:
a) Eliminating waste
b) Reducing inventory
c) Speeding up the processing time
d) Engaging with the workforce for continuous process improvement (quality circles)
Sofema Aviation Services (www.sassofia.com) and Sofema Online (www.sofemaonline.com) offer classroom & online training in Maintenance Regulatory & Vocational training. For details please email us at office@sassofia.com or online@sassofia.com
