Case Studies
While traditional automotive factories are loud and dark places, the Lexus plant in Cambridge adopted a different mindset and created an environment similar to a pharmaceutical laboratory, where every worker had his or her place. With the mindset that quality has to be integrated into each stage of a production process, each worker played a role of a quality control inspector to ensure that everything that was done in the factory was of the highest quality possible. Improvements were completed on the spot: computer monitors allowed workers to see the status of the production and stop the line if necessary. The mindset about integrating quality into every aspect of an organization is a practice that can be used by any company, even outside the automotive industry. Such a mindset encourages workers to focus on the provision of quality services to customers while their work environment is of high quality as well.
The Six Sigma improvement program was used to enhance a hospital’s strategic management associated with the lower revenues from drug sales. It was identified that only 31% of patients bought prescribed medication from the hospital’s pharmacy. As one of the inhibiting factors for the hospital’s pharmacy, a long time to fill in the prescription and waiting in lines as indicated by patients who preferred to buy drugs from their local drug stores. By collecting buying time data for three weeks, researchers came to a conclusion that factors such as inadequate signage, retrieval of drugs taking a lot of time, multitasking by pharmacists, decreased the flow of patients. In order to improve the problems, the Six Sigma team decided to implement changes such as the delivery of prescriptions ahead of the patient to speed up the retrieval process; this change caused the increase in patient flow in the hospital’s pharmacy by 23%.