Report on a Six Sigma Kaizen event

In August this year, contract specialist and NAVAIR AIRSpeed Black Belt Joan Devlin hosted a Kaizen event with members from AIR-2.0/AIR-1.0 and a content expert from the V-22 program office. Navy Reservist Lt. Cmdr. Chris Camacho, who was also with Devlin, mentions that it is important to lessen the changes within a process, so that Lean Six Sigma is implemented effectively. In course of the event, the Justification and Approval to Limit Competition process was spelt out in the form of a “value stream map.”

This showed that the J&A process had 26 steps and 17 rework loops, and the cycle ranged between 27.5 and 129 days. To get around the rework loops, it was decided to prepare a fresh template for the instruction. This template enabled the removal of irrelevant data, and the number of steps was reduced to 11-13 steps. dcmilitary.com reports:

According to Camacho, the J&A future-state value stream will save a minimum of two man-years within the 2.0 competency. “I suspect there will also be additional savings in workload reduction in other functional areas that were not taken into account in this measurement,” he said.