Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: And so throughout that, we noticed that there were, there were many effects that go into.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Why the process takes as long as it takes. So obviously after going through, when we use minitab. So I use minitab and I put that, all the data in there and it basically just shot out the Pareto chart with a litany of effects. There's some, some were just single effects, some were interaction effects, but the interaction effects, we actually noticed that they were pretty insignificant. Real significance showed that it was the operator experience and the review time. And those are, those are the two biggest things that we needed to focus on to actually reduce the time of this process.
[00:00:39] Speaker C: Welcome to why they Fail, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on why continuous improvement efforts fail. Buckle up, because we're not here for motivational fluff. We're dissecting the short sighted decisions and leadership agendas that sabotage CI success.
But don't worry, we'll clue you in to the few simple keys to success to avoid these pitfalls. If you're ready for the truth, let's do this.
[00:01:12] Speaker D: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of why they Fail. I'm your host, Kevin Clay. Usually on this show, we break down how companies miss the mark when implementing Lean and Six Sigma. But today we're flipping the script to talk about what happens when it's done right. We're shining a spotlight on a story of incredible success and we have a very special guest to help us do that. He's a decorated army officer, a West Point graduate, and a former football player for the Black Knights. In the midst of his demanding duties, he not only took on our Lean Six Sigma fast track to Black belt course, but achieved it in record time. Please join me in welcoming Edries Patterson. Today, Edries is going to share his journey and walk us through the real world military process he transformed, proving that these principles can drive powerful change anywhere.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Adri, give us a little background on, on who you are and your, your, your story in the the air, the army, and how kind of led. Led you up to where you are now.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So first and foremost, hello, Kevin. I appreciate you having me on the show. I appreciate all the mentorship and everything throughout the course and up to now leading to me receiving my black belt.
A little about myself. I grew up in Railway, New Jersey, not that far from West Point, maybe about an hour and a half or so.
And like you said, it went to West Point. Started off at the prep school there and then went to the academy. Following that, played football both at the prep school and at the academy and obviously graduated and commissioned. Now I'm an army officer. I'm a flute artillery officer currently.
And currently I'm in S3 shop, which is operations. When I first joined at West Point and then being an operations officer, I see many different processes and I wanted to focus on improving these processes. So throughout my time, I noticed there's plenty of waste. That's all everywhere, every single day. So that's what led to me wanting to actually achieve my black belt. While at West Point, I studied engineering management, where I found my interest in, I guess, project management, process improvement and things of that nature. And that's kind of what led me to wanting to move on to receive my Lean Six Sigma black belt.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Adris actually took our Lean Six Sigma fast track to black belt online.
It's a new offering that we have and Dries took that and it was funded by the army through what's called the Army Ignited Credentialing Assistance Program, which is a phenomenal program that helps our army soldiers get credentials so that when they transition out, even while they're in, that helps out the army and it eventually helps out the economy.
I'm really proud of that. You're. You've taken the black belt and, and you had some time to focus on that. I think you or on medical leave, so you had really time to sit and plan and focus on this process.
So the fast track program is actually where we take a black belt all the way from scratch. Usually it's almost like going to college. You get your undergrad first, before your master's. A black belt would be considered the master's. And a green belt, which is a subset lower than that, would be your undergrad, but you kind of took them all on at the same time, which we, we tell people is tough. It's. It's a really tough course, but you did it and you actually did it really in record time. And kudos for that. So it only took you a couple weeks to do it.
In the, in the black belt course, we follow the DMAIC process, define, measure, analyze, improve and control. It's part of the foundation for how Six Sigma practitioner solves a problem.
So let's, let's kind of talk about the process you sold and talk about the path, your journey through the domain process. So that other people listening to this who are thinking that want to engage in a green belt or a black belt or any one of these belts, but I'm not really sure what I'm getting into. Again, just tell us what, what the process Was that you looked at that you investigated and then how did that, how did that look throughout that domic process?
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Yeah, so like you mentioned, so I was on convalescent leave at the time when I began my black belt course. So I had plenty of time to actually be at home and go through the online course self paced. So that's something that I appreciated. And also you have to have that discipline to actually go through the course. No one's going to make you sit there and actually like go through your courses every day. So. But yeah, I took that time during my convalescent leave to actually take the course, complete the course. Of course there's a few quizzes that you have to complete but after that then you get into the project. So the project, like you said, follows the domain process. So the specific process that I looked to improve was the orders publishing process. Like, like I previously stated, I'm currently an S3 operations shop. So that's one of our big tasks I would say is to receive and publish orders. So I'm a brigade operations officer. So we receive our orders from hire and we craft our unit specific order and we end up pushing it down to our battalion units. So in that process alone, in my time as operations officer, I've noticed there's, as I talked about earlier, there's plenty of waste. So it takes a lot of time from when we receive the order from hire and takes to the point where we have to actually publish the order down to our subordinate units.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: We're talking about waste. Lean Six Sigma is a combination of two methodologies, Lean and Six Sigma. Six Sigma is really about reducing the variation in the process. You know, if you're do five people are processing the same kind of order that for the same thing then it should take the same amount of time. And if we were to time that we might find that processing the order, even though it's being done with the same process, it may take a wildly different amounts of time because everybody does it differently and that leads to defects.
Six Sigma really focuses on variation, whereas Lean focuses on the waste in the process. The things that we do that don't add direct value to the customer and one of them is time. So that order probably sits in baskets and in boxes waiting for something to happen most of the time. What other kind of waste did you see in that process when you first started to investigate it?
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Yeah, so obviously like you said, so the waiting times like when we craft the order is waiting in the queue waiting to be reviewed. That's as the biggest one so waiting on that review time, that's the biggest waste that we were actually able to reduce.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Throughout the process. Also, another big thing was the rework. So a lot of times, like you mentioned, the different variations of people. So if one person sees the order and crafts it one way how they see fit, and another person receives it and crafts it how they see fit, and then it gets sent up for approval.
So one person might have more experience or is more trained on how the orders process works or how they've been typing these orders and publishing orders for a while now, but the other person might not have that same level of experience.
So it goes to get approved, but is waiting all this time to get approved, and then once it gets to the approver reviews it and it's like, no, this needs to get fixed. This needs to get fixed. And then kicks it back. And then now obviously back in that waiting phase because there's other tasks that need to be completed. And now you have to rework it and then send it back up for approval. And then so kind of just, I feel like that rework phase, that. That has a lot to do with it as well.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: And this you really found in the Value Stream app. In the defined phase. So in the defined phase, we define the process. We define how long it was taking on the median time. So we took a sample of, I think, 30 or 40 different orders, and we said, okay, our meeting time is this. So that helps us to understand where our current state is. And then I think you went through a value stream map, and the value stream map really showed you that you added very little value to the process. Like, most of it was just sitting and waiting in different inboxes. So, so that, that was pretty telling. In the defined phase, how did you, you measure it? How did you draw this information from a database? Did you go and do time studies?
[00:09:58] Speaker A: You can say it's a database. So with all of our orders that we craft and we publish, we basically we put them all together. Like, it's kind of like in an Excel sheet, because the orders is. They have taskings in them. So we have to track when these tasks get complete, if these tasks are complete. So we make sure that we trash. We track all the, all of these tasks. I just went back and like you said, it was a sample of 30. So I just went back on that Excel sheet that we have, call it a task tracker. And I just chose a random sample of 30.
And so after taking those, and then I just measured the average time. Like you mentioned, it took from receiving the order because we marked the time that we received the order from our hire unit and all throughout the process, and we marked the time that we actually published the order. So I just took that time. That was the baseline. So that's what we took to measure and see how long it was actually taking to publish these orders.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Okay. In the measure phase, a lot of people have trouble with the msa, the measurement system analysis, which is basically verifying that you have good data, because you know as well as I do that garbage in, garbage out.
So we have to first check our data to make sure that the data that we're getting and we're going to analyze that we have reliable data. So I believe you did an audit to make sure that those times were correct.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: Yeah, that's correct. So there's plenty of ways to measure. After putting those through and measuring to see, just to get our baseline, we measure. And we found out there was a. The average time was about 6.75. And obviously not every order will come come back with that.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: You probably had a huge standard deviation which told you that the process was really kind of wildly out of control. Everybody did things their own way now. Now, the hardest part of the black belt is in the analyze phase, because that's where you have to, as a black belt, you have to take the process up to a certain level of optimization and, and do it with regression. And you did, you did a phenomenal regression in it, but it only took you up to a certain point.
And then you did something that we really only do in our black belt course, and that's the doe, the design of experiments, which is.
It's funny that I meet a lot of people and we work with companies all over the world, and not just manufacturing companies, but most service companies say DOE is not for service.
We don't do that kind of stuff.
And what you solved was a transactional process, and you partially solved it with the doe.
That's, that's a good representation to other people that the process doesn't care what discipline you're in. It just cares that there's waste in various.
Yeah, you, you.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: You.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: Had an experiment, controlled the experiment, had different variables that you controlled in that experiment, and then you came out with the. Really the right answer for your orders.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it all obviously definitely worked out. But yeah, like you mentioned, we did the or. So I did a design of experiment and throughout that we noticed that there were, there were many effects that go into why the process takes as long as it takes. So obviously, after going through and we use minitab. So I use minitab and I put that, all the data in there and it basically just shot out the Pareto chart with a litany of effects. There's some were just interaction effects, but the interaction effects, we actually noticed that they were pretty insignificant.
Real significance showed that it was the operator experience and the review time. And those were, those were the two biggest things that we needed to focus on to actually reduce the time of this process.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: Yeah, and in most processes we don't, we don't evaluate math to find a problem. We just sit around a boardroom table and say what's the problem? But we don't have really justification of what is the problem because we don't understand it through math and data. It's through experiential learning.
And while that is a great way to solve a problem, it's never going to, going to be as definitive as math, as definitive as using data. I think from your project that's changed the way you think to look at data to solve a problem.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Yeah, it's definitely changed my way of thinking as a whole.
Before, the reason why I wanted to go get my black belt was because I've seen plenty of processes that there's a lot of waiting time and everyone in the military knows hurry up and wait. And so obviously I wanted to reduce that waiting time. But now after actually going through the course and completing this project, it makes me focus more on the data like you mentioned. So taking that data and actually putting it in whatever tool I'm using, like I said for this one, I use minitab and actually analyzing that data to find out where exactly I can improve the overall process.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: Once you found the key inputs through data and through some other tools like the fmea, then you move those into the improve phase and then, then you optimize it because the, the DOE actually told you what to optimize. You had a pretty high R squared in your doe. What kind of effect did it have on the process? What, what did you take the process from in a metric and then bring it to in the approved phase?
[00:15:41] Speaker A: When I first began the baseline the process, it was one person that's receiving the order and then reading through the order and crafting the order. That one person sends it up to the one reviewer, slash approver, and then that person gives it back to the, that same individual that sent it up to him or her and then they end up doing the rework or if there is no rework, then actually publishing it. And obviously within the S3 shop. There's plenty of tasks that have to get done. So just the orders publishing process is just one task, one of many. So the one main thing that we did was adding additional individuals, training them and making sure that they all have the same level of training as the people who were already in the process. So even though the people who are already in the process, they already have the experience, but training more individuals, making sure that they are all up to speed and make sure that everyone is on the same sheet of music and we're working to one standard, that alone. So if one person is busy, next man, next woman, they're up. So that's one big thing that we were able to change and do in the improvement phase of the process.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: Basically you really just built the standards. Everybody could be following the same process, not their process, but following a standardized, operationalized process based on an sop, adding on the individuals.
[00:17:01] Speaker A: Yeah, we all, we had an SOP for the baseline, but it's, it was very loosely worded, so we tightened that up. We, I wouldn't even really say it was an sop. We actually made like, created an SOP and made sure everyone followed that SOP and that led to our improvements.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: Okay, the, the improvement took you from, from where to where it took you from. I think that six, six and a half days down to something shorter.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: There was a. So about 6.75 hours down to 6.25 hours, which in minutes is like 405 minutes, down to I think like 375 minutes. I'm just for the process, like on a daily basis.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Right. You're looking at this and I mean that's, that's a pretty significant change. But what about the change in the standard deviation in the amount of variation between these process. So I, I bet you brought the standard deviation way down. And that's really where the, the big hit of this project comes in is, is I might have something that lasts, you know, eight or nine hours. I don't know if you had that in your data, but I believe I saw a data that was widely varied and then data after the process, because you added these standards and you took a lot of variation out, the standard deviation went down. So you actually move the curve lower and then thin the curve out as it moved.
[00:18:26] Speaker A: We were definitely able to lower the standard deviation, obviously when it was the baseline process and there's only a few individuals in the process and there's plenty of other things to do outside of order publishing. Sometimes there is orders that were published around six and A half hours. And like you said, there were some orders that were published at eight hours or something like that. So, so, and obviously we don't want just order publishing to be one thing that someone has to focus on the entire day at work when there's plenty of other tasks that need to be completed and then adding on the other individuals when they first began, they don't have that level of experience getting them on board. And also when they first began, there were a wide variation of times to take to publish, but the bulk of the time was in the part of crafting the order or it's just any anywhere in the process. But we were definitely able to lower the standard deviation as well.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: Awesome. And, and how, how well is this process now been accepted?
[00:19:28] Speaker A: It's going really well. When it was implemented, when I first submitted everything and completed the project, submitted it and talked with like our stakeholders, they noticed that there was a significant difference. So they were happy with that. We are continuing with the improvements, but with what we already have put in place, we are still continuing on with it. It's still going very well. We are monitoring everything that all the tasks that we have and all the orders and we are making sure that all the times kind of stay to a minimum. So. But ever since I completed the project, there haven't been any orders that were published past the previous median time.
[00:20:06] Speaker B: Wow. Wow.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: So it was going very well.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: Excellent. I and my team vetted Adris's project throughout the DMAIC process. Went through the dmaic, we had to, we went to, through define then we had a tollgate review.
So we formally went through these different steps in the process.
A lot of companies you take on a green belt project or a black belt project and, and you go through the whole thing and don't really vet it till the end instead of vetting it in, in, in between each phase. And that allows us to make sure that we finish the right things. How do you think this is? How has it changed the way you think and how is this going to affect you in your career? In career in the army and on, you know, after the army, the goal.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: Was to improve processes overall. But now I kind of, I look kind of at the data more, I analyze the data more wherever it is. So yeah, it helped me help my data analytics skills very much. I would say also like kind of it helped me be able to one, improve the process within my unit. And then following I do exit the military, I can say I have the experience and I have proven results and I can take either this process or I can then tweak it slightly. Or I can just say I have the experience and I can be the one to improve process, improve my levels of confidence. Those are the things that I would say it helped me with and changed my way of thinking.
[00:21:34] Speaker B: Excellent statement. This is a process that goes on everywhere so it can have have huge impacts.
Dries, thank you very much for coming on. The last thing I want to do is ask you, you know, in the class, if you had one word to describe your experience in the class, what would that be?
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Amazing.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: Amazing. Amazing. Awesome. That's a great, great word.
[00:21:59] Speaker D: What an incredible story.
Edris, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experience.
It is truly a masterclass in how to approach a problem not with guesswork, but with data. You took a complex, time sensitive military process, applied the DMAIC framework, and achieved a significant reduction in both the average time and the variation.
Your journey shows that with discipline and the right tools, anyone can drive meaningful improvement. Hearing that the one word you'd use to describe your experience was amazing is the best feedback we could hope for. You've provided a powerful example for anyone out there wondering if they can tackle their own process challenges.
Thank you again for your time and your service. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of why they Fail.
To make sure you never miss a conversation, subscribe to our YouTube channel. It's a completely free way to support what we do. Make sure you're following the podcast on both Spotify and Apple so you get every new episode instantly. And finally, if you found value in today's story, please leave us a five star review. It helps us reach more people and continue bringing you these insights. We'll see you next time.
