Issue link: https://industrialengineer.epubxp.com/i/920036
38 ISE Magazine | www.iise.org/ISEmagazine Gain speed by losing tools the expense and less-than-stellar results. A major survey of healthcare companies revealed that 54 percent do not intend to embrace Six Sigma tools. Multiple studies have reported that "nearly 60 percent of all corporate Six Sigma initiatives fail to yield the desired results." A handful of companies (e.g., 3M, Home Depot) have dropped their heavy Six Sigma tools due to negative impact on their company's performance. So why do some companies continue to hold on to their heavy Six Sigma tools when they aren't working? Analyzing the Mann Gulch and South Canyon disasters may provide the answer. At times, speed is essential On Aug. 5, 1949, 14 men from the U.S. Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters and smokejumpers, along with their fore- man and a forest ranger, were trapped at the bottom of a steep hill in Mann Gulch in Montana's Helena National Forest. Ex- ploding fire was catching up from behind, and 13 died while trying to outrun the fire. The men ignored foreman Wagner Dodge, who ordered them to drop their tools. The fire caught up with them. Only three, including Dodge, survived. Decades later, a similar tragedy occurred on Storm King Mountain in Colorado. On July 6, 1994, firefighters were trapped at the bottom of a hill in South Canyon. Once again, firefighters ignored orders to drop their packs and heavy tools. This time, 14 perished. And subsequent thermal analysis re- vealed that one man died wearing his backpack and carry- ing his tools. Again, by dropping their tools, these firefighters could have saved energy, moved faster and possibly escaped. The Mann Gulch disaster was made famous in Norman Ma- clean's 1992 book You g Me d Fire. While some men threw away their equipment before Dodge's order, others did not. One person, Jim Harrison, was exhausted from fighting the fire and sat with his heavy pack on, making no effort to take it off. Three possibilities explain why firefighters refused to drop their tools: Tools were costly, too many simultaneous activities were taking place and they failed to realize the power of small changes. First, firefighters had learned during training programs that equipment and tools not only were costly but were the key to survival. They spent hours learning how to use, carry and take care of their tools. They were trained to protect them by putting them down away from flames, which eats up precious time. As Maclean described the events at Mann Gulch, one firefighter trying to outrun the fire stopped, took a colleague's shovel and "leaned it against a pine tree." Second, both disaster sites had simultaneous, life-threaten- ing action taking place on many levels. The firefighters ex- perienced information overload as they tried to assess the size of the flames, check wind direction, dodge flying debris, deal with smoke, weigh escape routes, follow their foreman's orders and deal with physical exhaustion. With the looming threat of death bearing down, there was too much information to pro- cess. They became overwhelmed and made mistakes, which included holding on to heavy tools. Third, the firefighters failed to realize the impact of small changes. Although many people consider small changes trivial, even a few extra inches per second could mean the difference between life and death. One analysis of the chain of events at South Canyon revealed that the firefighters could have outrun the approaching blaze if they had dropped their tools five min- utes earlier. There are similarities between these tragedies and the busi- ness world, and although loss of life is unlikely, not learning from these examples could yield huge financial setbacks or kill companies. Six Sigma failures Our study is based on many companies from various industries: home furnishings, aerospace, consumer goods, heavy metal, food and beverages. In these companies, operations had become disorganized with haphazard expansion, mergers and acquisitions. Over the years, many product lines were introduced, but old ones were not discontinued. One company was offering more than 65,000 SKUs while launching 3,000 new SKUs a year. While manufacturing and distribution operations generally worked, they appeared more like a giant plate of spaghetti with opera- tions intertwined and with flow patterns entangled. Consis- tently adding new technology like CNC, robots, vertical lift modules and high-speed conveyors added to the chaos and confusion. Information technology was a sore point because mergers and acquisitions brought different legacy systems with many redundancies and incompatibilities. In short, as the com- panies grew, no systemic analysis was performed to streamline operations or eliminate waste. These companies implemented Six Sigma to improve opera- tional performance and competitiveness. Implementation fol- lowed the classic model. A steering team of experts (e.g., black belts with proven track records) coordinated implementation with support from managers. The objective was to drive im- provements from the bottom by forming improvement teams from all functional areas, such as production and distribution operations, human resources and sales and marketing. A con- tinuous improvement database was established, the status of all improvements efforts was disseminated, and high visibility was maintained throughout the implementation. With managers' support, the steering team developed improvement teams from different functional areas. It is now well-known that Six Sigma projects often go through three different stages for first-pass inspection, as illus- trated in Figure 1: Introducing, struggling and dying. In the in-