SigmaForge
Lean tools

Four Lean tools, built in

Waste walk, 5S audit, Kaizen tracker and mistake-proofing, saved to the project like everything else.

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4
Lean tools
built in
14
templates
standard work included
5
tollgates
one per phase
56
tools
across the loop

Lean Tools · Improve phase

  • TIMWOODS waste walkWhite Belt
  • 5S audit scorecardWhite Belt
  • Kaizen event trackerYellow Belt
  • Poka-Yoke ideationYellow Belt

Each result is saved to the project like everything else.

The problem

“There is waste everywhere and no system for removing it.”

Lean goes wrong when the waste walk is an event rather than a habit. The eight wastes get logged against the process step they belong to, 5S gets scored rather than eyeballed, and each improvement is tracked with a before and after. Then standard work is written down, because an improvement nobody documented is one that leaves with the person who made it.

What is in the box

  • TIMWOODS waste walk
  • 5S audit
  • Kaizen tracker
  • Poka-Yoke mistake-proofing
  • Standard work and SOP templates

What you leave with

  • Waste logged against the step it happens at
  • A scored 5S baseline
  • Kaizens with a measured before and after
  • Standard work somebody can follow

The tools

Four Lean tools, each with one job.

4 tools in the Improve phase. Describe what you saw, check the brief it reads back, and get a structured result you can save into the project.

  • TIMWOODS waste walk

    Name the eight wastes in a process (transport, inventory, motion, waiting, over-production, over-processing, defects and unused skills) from what you observed.

  • 5S audit scorecard

    Score a workstation from 1 to 5 on sort, set, shine, standardize and sustain, so the baseline is a number rather than an impression.

  • Kaizen event tracker

    Plan a five-day Kaizen event from the problem, the target and the team: an objective and a deliverable for each day.

  • Poka-Yoke ideation

    Start from one failure mode and its context, and get error-proofing ideas for it.

Methods

Lean and Kaizen, with the tools behind them.

Both methods are run with tools that already exist in the platform. Nothing on these cards is a label with nothing behind it.
All six methodologies

  • Lean

    Take the waste out of the flow, then hold the new standard.

    • Waste walk
    • 5S audit
    • Kaizen tracker
    • Mistake-proofing
    • Standard work template

  • Kaizen

    Small improvements, run quickly, with the before and after measured.

    • Kaizen tracker
    • Idea hopper
    • Control chart
    • Pilot plan

Before you run it

Put a number on the improvement.

A Kaizen with no number on it is easy to cancel. ImpactMatrix works out the return on an improvement, the cost of poor quality against a benchmark, and the written business case, and saves each one into the project.

  • ROI calculator
  • Cost of poor quality with a benchmark gauge
  • Business case builder
See ImpactMatrix
sigmaforge.ai/impactmatrix
ImpactMatrix ROI calculator filled in for a burn-in project, with expected annual savings of 610,000 dollars and the improvement described.
Product screen, demo dataAn ROI worked out for a burn-in project

After you run it

Measure the before and the after.

A waste walk says where the loss is; the numbers say how big it is. DataForge works out the yield at every step and shows which one takes the most, so the Kaizen goes where the loss is largest.

  • First-pass yield by step, and the rolled throughput yield
  • The biggest single loss, named
  • Saved into the project as a deliverable
See DataForge
sigmaforge.ai/dataforge
A saved DataForge yield chain inside an enterprise project: the cascading yield chart, rolled throughput yield, normalized yield, steps and total loss, and the biggest single loss.
Product screen, demo dataA yield chain saved inside a project

Where they sit

Where each tool sits in DMAIC.

Lean tools are not a separate program. Each one is filed against the phase it serves and the belt that teaches it, the same way the product files them.
Lean and related tools by DMAIC phase and belt
ToolWhereDefineMeasureAnalyzeImproveControlBelt
Fishbone diagramDataForgeAnalyzeWhite
5 Whys analysisDataForgeAnalyzeWhite
Pareto analysisDataForgeAnalyzeWhite
TIMWOODS waste walkLean ToolsImproveWhite
5S audit scorecardLean ToolsImproveWhite
Kaizen event trackerLean ToolsImproveYellow
Poka-Yoke ideationLean ToolsImproveYellow
Pilot and implementation planDocuForgeImproveGreen
Standard work and SOPDocuForgeControlGreen
I-MR control chartDataForgeControlGreen

The four Lean tools. The rest are the DataForge analyses and DocuForge templates a Lean project uses alongside them.

More in platform

Thirty minutes

Run your next waste walk in it.

Bring a process you want to lean out. We will walk it through the tools with you and save the results to a project.

Book a demoLean, as a solution