NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

By: Jim Hodges

Across the floor from the stage in the Reid Center, Nick Kepics began the briefing for the Langley Launchers.

"When we started, we were terrible," he said Friday to a room of 36 employees from scattered departments across NASA Langley Research Center. "I wouldn't have hired us either."

More briefers said the Launchers were feeling better about themselves since they started whittling away at the cost of manufacturing balls to be catapulted at a target. They had reduced the price of a ball from $2,250 to $35.40. Failures had been reduced from 31 to zero, production time from 10 balls in 20 minutes to 25 balls in 1 minute, 16 seconds.

The Launchers' final briefer, Gail E. Brown, declared, "We snatched this company from disaster to the pinnacle of success."

And then the Shooting Stars announced that they had lowered that cost to $33 a ball, matching quality and getting the government target.

Score a triumph for the Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt Training Program.

Image right: (from left to right) Deputy Director Stephen Jurczyk, Center Director Lesa Roe and Associate Director Cynthia Lee participate in a team building exercise for Greenbelt Training. The object of this exercise was to drop a playing card from shoulder height onto a white square. Credit: Sean Smith.

Taught at Langley by Mark Adrian and Patty Fundun of Marshall Space Center, Lean Six Sigma uses various steps to identify waste that can be removed to streamline a process to make it less expensive.

That's the "Lean" part.

"Six Sigma" aims for quality control by removing excessive variation.

The program is adapted from management techniques developed in Japan by Toyota a half-century ago, as is some of the terminology. Friday's exercise was a "kaizen," or rapid process event. The students were in the process of earning their "green belt." From there, they can earn a "black belt."

The catapulted balls exercise was fiction, but Lesa Roe, Langley's center director and aspiring "green belt," has seen the program work for real.

"I used it down at Johnson (Space Center) when Principal Investigators were having trouble getting information for the (International) Space Station," she said Friday. "We reduced 40 percent of what we were asking for. For the first time, I began to get positive feedback from the PIs."

It's one of the reasons she champions the use of Lean Six Sigma at Langley.

When the center's budget process involved about 5,000 changes from beginning of the process to its end, it, too, became a candidate. So, too, was the flight test article fabrication process.

Adrian, whose Adrian Technologies administers the program at Marshall, takes another real-life approach to selling it.

"We used it on Ares I-A," he said of the rocket that will propel astronauts aloft as part of the Constellation program that is sending NASA back to the moon.

"We got rid of 60 days of the design process. … We found that there were 1,100 to 1,200 meetings to prepare for the COFR (Certification of Flight Readiness). That's people meeting to prepare for a meeting."

When Adrian and others finished, the meetings were cut to about 300 and the 60 days saved were built into preparing Ares.

The Lean process uses a product or service flow line from inception to completion and identifies waste. It then determines activities that contribute to value; "required" waste, which is desired by customers or needed by current technology; and "real" waste, which can be eliminated.

"In government, 'rework' is the biggest waste," said Fundum. "That's too many steps to complete a job, or 'over-processing.' "

Adrian uses a memo that requires 50 people to sign off on it as an example of over-processing. Could a single signature with communications about the memo to the others be enough?

Six Sigma then requires that a standard be met continually to maintain product or service quality.

Some of the terminology can be daunting when selling Lean Six Sigma. Employees see "lean" and "eliminate waste" as job threatening.

They shouldn't, Adrian said. "If you use Lean Six Sigma to eliminate employees, you can only use it once," he added.

Roe agreed. While Lean Six Sigma instruction wasn't brought to Langley as an answer to problems brought out by employees in a recent Culture Survey, it can be used to help solve them.

"One of the things we heard was that employees felt like they had too much of a burden," she said. "We can use this to streamline things to … lessen that burden and enable employees to do value-added things."

The group taught from Feb. 4-8 was admonished to "go slow" when trying to implement the lessons they learned through the week.

"We want small successes, not big failures," Fundum said.

They were the first of two that will get the instruction this year, with an eventual goal of 6 percent of employees learning enough to get their "green belts." From there, the goal is that 1 percent get "black belts."

It's a goal that can be met. After the final session, 23 of the 36 students signified their desire to study for a "black belt."

"It can be an important tool for us," Roe said.

NASA Langley Research Center
Managing Editor: Jim Hodges
Executive Editor and Responsible NASA Official: H. Keith Henry
Editor and Curator: Denise Adams