As a result of a competitive market landscape and tough supply chain conditions, raw material prices are volatile, with margins shrinking. A significant challenge for many businesses, especially within the packaging and printing industry, is sustenance. Fortunately, there are concrete methods that can help to mitigate the changes in the market.
Lean operations and continuous improvement are promising approaches to tackling unstable market conditions. They act as differentiators in the industry & can add value towards a high-performance culture.
The DMAIC framework and origins
The DMAIC principle primarily helps control waste and improve the production system's OEE (Overall Equipment Efficiency). Anyone who has ever been a part of the printing industry can clearly understand the correlation between wastage and profits and why OEE is highly important. Every process that controls and reduces waste will be a huge addendum to the business. Hence, DMAIC is highly relevant to us in the printing and packaging industry.
Within the DMAIC framework, we find the Lean Six Sigma (LSS) methodology. LSS is multidimensional and is designed to streamline and improve the production process:
- Identifies and eliminates problems
- Removes waste to improve efficiency and working
- Enhances product quality and service levels to achieve higher customer satisfaction
LSS origins
Lean as a principle was created at Toyota motors many years ago, originally called TPS (Toyota Production System). Western industries later adopted the methodology, further improving it and renaming it Lean Manufacturing.
Six Sigma was first developed at Motorola during the late 1980s to improve their performance efficiencies (Cpk values) and process controls. The approach centred on identifying and eliminating anything that caused friction in the production process. As a concept, Six Sigma was later infused with Lean Manufacturing and formed a hybrid culture with the primary goal of eliminating waste – Lean Six Sigma.
Read more: Sustainable manufacturing: Optimizing material and energy consumption
How does Lean Six Sigma work?
Six Sigma consists of five components and works on the DMAIC framework:
| Define | Measure | Analyse | Improve | Control |
There are also five principles of Lean:
| Value | Value stream | Flow | Pull | Perfection |
And, three types of waste:
- Muda: Non-value-added work
- Mura: Uneven flow
- Muri: Overburdening resources
DMAIC Methodology
- Define: This initial stage sets the context within which the Six Sigma project will be performed.
- Measure: During the second stage, starting point metrics are recorded to establish the current performance level and limitations of the process that will be worked upon.
- Analyse: The third stage consists of reviewing the metrics, using various tools to understand the cause and effects within the system under examination.
- Improve: In the fourth stage, you use the information found in the analysis to develop possible solutions. Once the best solutions are developed, they are deployed as improvements.
- Control: The fifth stage focuses on developing control plans and activities to monitor and sustain your improvements.
Read more: Labels: Providing wings of hope for start-ups with digital printing
Which industries benefit from LSS and DMAIC?
The process improvement techniques of Lean Six Sigma and the DMAIC methodology are relevant to all industries. Looking at the printing industry, LSS isn’t as widely popular as it is elsewhere due to the complexity of variables and lack of statistical data from production. Conventional printing processes rely heavily on the skills of the operator, and most online decisions are based on visual comparisons.
Modern printing presses and online print inspection systems offer a greater number of measurable controls, making the process easier to regulate within set limits. Moreover, they allow ERP to connect with machine intelligence and IIoT. These integrations provide vital data that can be processed and analysed to uncover underlying problems and provide strategies to fix them.
At the printing site, the focus should be on capturing actual data from each stage of the production process, as well as inspecting and processing it further using LSS tools. After the data is captured, the next step involves identifying the top four contributors to quality issues, wastage, and machine downtime, and continuing working on them using the DMAIC methodology.
Read more: Packaging and labelling: Avoiding the blame game after product launch
By meticulously following this process of DMAIC and LSS, you can expect a gradual but significant improvement to:
- Reduction in wastage
- Improvement in quality
- Lower downtime leading to better OEE
- Better outputs and higher billing values
If you want to know more about how you can put the DMAIC framework and LSS methodology into practice, feel free to contact us.
