Why Lean Six Sigma Tollgate Review Presentation to Management is Better on a Flip Chart with Hand-Drawn Visuals Than On Computer?

When presenting the initial tollgate review to management, it’s often more effective to use a flip chart with hand-drawn visuals, such as Value Stream Maps (VSM), root cause analysis (RCA), and A3 reports pasted on the wall, instead of relying on a polished PowerPoint presentation. Here are several reasons why this approach can lead to better engagement and outcomes:

1. Fosters Active Participation and Engagement

Using flip charts with hand-drawn visuals encourages a more interactive and collaborative atmosphere. With the visuals physically displayed on the wall, management and other participants are more likely to gather around, ask questions, and discuss the details in real-time. It breaks the passive nature of traditional PowerPoint presentations, where the presenter is usually speaking while the audience listens quietly. The hands-on format promotes discussion and engagement, which is vital for getting valuable feedback early in the process.

2. Visual Clarity and Big-Picture Focus

When key elements like a VSM or RCA are hand-drawn and displayed on flip charts, it allows everyone in the room to view the big picture at a glance. Having these charts on the wall instead of a slide deck means that the full scope of the project or analysis is continuously in front of everyone, ensuring nothing is missed or overlooked. It also prevents the distractions of transitioning between slides, which can sometimes cause the audience to lose focus on the most critical issues.

3. Real-Time Flexibility

Hand-drawn visuals on a flip chart allow for immediate changes, updates, and annotations during the review meeting. If management suggests modifications or asks for additional details, you can quickly sketch or write them down, incorporating feedback on the spot. This flexibility fosters a sense of collaborative problem-solving that PowerPoint, with its static nature, often cannot provide. Adjustments can be made right in the moment, enhancing the efficiency of the review.

4. Raw and Authentic Presentation of Work

Presenting hand-drawn Value Stream Maps and analyses offers an authentic and transparent view of the work. It signals that the focus is on the substance of the project, not on the polish of the presentation. Management can appreciate seeing the “work in progress,” understanding that the team is in the problem-solving phase rather than simply reporting outcomes. It can help build trust in the process and make it clear that the project is being actively developed with room for input.

5. Encourages Direct Problem-Solving Discussions

Displaying charts on the wall, particularly RCA diagrams or A3 problem-solving reports, creates a visual environment where everyone is encouraged to discuss and challenge the findings. When key information is laid out clearly and simply, management is more likely to engage in meaningful problem-solving discussions, identifying gaps and proposing solutions that might be overlooked in a more formal PowerPoint presentation.

6. Reduced Overemphasis on Presentation Aesthetics

PowerPoint presentations can sometimes shift the focus toward aesthetics—such as slide design, fonts, and transitions—at the expense of content. When using a flip chart and hand-drawn visuals, the focus stays entirely on the analysis and the findings, rather than how well the information is presented. This practical approach helps eliminate distractions and ensures management concentrates on the actual content of the review.

7. Demonstrates Process Thinking

Using hand-drawn visuals and flip charts emphasizes the importance of process thinking. A hand-drawn Value Stream Map or A3 report on the wall shows that the team is deeply engaged in the problem-solving process, rather than simply delivering a polished final result. It helps convey that the team is still exploring, analyzing, and refining the project, which can foster a more collaborative mindset among management.

8. Facilitates Ongoing Iteration and Improvement

Once the tollgate review is completed, leaving the flip charts and hand-drawn diagrams up on the wall can facilitate ongoing improvements. These visuals can remain as a living document, readily available for the team and management to update and revise as the project progresses. The visible, evolving nature of these tools helps keep the project’s goals and challenges at the forefront, leading to continuous engagement and problem-solving throughout the project’s lifecycle.

Conclusion

Choosing to use flip charts with hand-drawn visuals during the initial tollgate review offers several advantages over a polished PowerPoint presentation. It fosters a more collaborative and engaged environment, enables real-time flexibility, and ensures the focus remains on the problem-solving process rather than presentation aesthetics. By emphasizing clarity, authenticity, and collaboration, this approach can lead to better discussions, quicker feedback, and ultimately more successful project outcomes.

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Standard Work

Standard work (also known as Standardized work) is a very powerful Lean tool that has been adopted by other continuous improvement methodologies (eg Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma).  Standard work provides the baseline by documenting the current best practice. It can also be used in Quality Control for maintaining quality, productivity, and safety. It is the workflow in which the job elements sequence is organized efficiently can be easily repeated by the workers. It is the most efficient method to develop a product with a balanced flow to achieve the desired output rate. The objective of Standardized work is to introduce Kaizen (small improvements). The benefits of Standardized work is employee training, process stability, problem-solving, Kaizen, employee involvement and poka-yoke.

Each step in the Standardized Work process needs to be defined and performed repeatedly in a similar way. Any variations of the process will result in increased cycle time and may create quality issues. Standardized Work defines how a process needs to be consistent in execution and aims for capturing best practices. It also requires a baseline which is the point to adopt a better approach and making continuous improvement and make available the concept of training and worker learning.

There are three elements of Standardized work:

• Takt Time and Cycle Time: Takt Time defined as the ratio of Daily operating time and the required quantity per day. Cycle Time is the actual time for process.
• Work Sequence: Defined as the order in which the work is done in a given process.
• Work-In-Progress: Defined as the minimum number of unfinished materials required for the worker to complete the activity of the process.

Standard work is not a static work process. It is always improving and changing. There is a risk involved by workers not participating in process optimization as they can feel job threat.  Standardized work may delay the results and desired outputs if workers are not well trained or turn-over of workers. Evolving Standardized Work is sometimes more difficult Six Sigma methods. If it is professionally developed, it will make sure that any individual can carry out the work with no variance and irregularity in the outputs.

Standard Work deals with repeatable human work and interactions with the process in the time needed to meet demand. It is the current “best practice” for safety, quality, delivery, performance, and cost. It should be depicted by easy-to-follow visuals and revised as improvements or changes in demand are made.

Many people feel that Standardized Work isn’t effective. This can be true when companies can not reinforce the use of Standardized Work and make it accessible to everyone. Some companies worry that structured processes do not allow them to meet customer needs.

When documented and applied correctly, Standardized Work creates more time to meet special requests and satisfy customer demand. It is the foundation of a Lean process. Having Standardized Work procedures will reduce unnecessary variation and maximize your employees’ creativity as they help to continuously improve the processes in which they work. By eliminating the wastes of waiting, over-processing, and intellect, employees have more time to focus on the task and produce the most effective results.

Standardization is not a technique meant to make clones and strip away the worker’s creativity. Transactional companies that rely on their creativity believe that Standardized Work is too rigorous and does not allow for freedom of thought. Standardized Work is not just standard operating procedures.  Standardized Work is essential to building Lean processes.  One must engage the workforce to help standardize work, and then empower them with the authority to continuously improve the processes they are responsible for. Once you have Standardized Work implemented, set up some simple diagnostic tools to monitor and manage your processes. Control charts, visual displays, and reports on key metrics are all helpful in maintaining a culture of Standardized Work and signaling the need for revisions.

It is the standard service level your customers can rely on time after time. Standardized Work provides customers the peace of mind that all essential, repeatable parts of your process are working optimally and producing high-quality results. This gives the flexibility to creatively meet your customer’s unique demands without affecting the overall quality of your product or service.

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SMED

Single Minute Exchange of Die

SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Die), also known as Quick Changeover, Set-up Reduction, is a systematic approach that enables organisations to dramatically reduce or eliminate changeover time. It is a very important tool in continuous improvement methodologies (eg Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma).

The inventor of SMED, Professor Shigeo Shingo, introduced the concept to Toyota and identified inefficiencies in car body-molding presses in the 1950’s. There were reasons for inefficiencies mainly for tools changeover times which was two and eight hours. Whenever changeover was long, the production time lost caused higher cost of production. Toyota also had expensive land for storage. Shingo suggested that tools changeover costs can be reduced and lot size can be shrunk to reduce factory expenses. He was able to shorten set-up times from 1 to 2 hours per each exchange of dies to only a few minutes each, which allowed them to run lesser batches and line up more carefully to customer requirements.

Utilization of SMED can take place within the manufacturing to software development businesses. Various concepts from SMED can be applied to machinery to even human beings. Considering this, every time a person shifts between everyday jobs, they lose concentration and performance may be affected making a potential for making errors. The pit crews in racing industry – NASCAR while preparing each pit stop before it begins has been using a well-coordinated team to perform multiple tasks in few seconds. The team utilizes many techniques used in SMED like a tire changeover now takes 15 seconds, and do take into account the human factor. In fact, the trip from a 15 minute tire changeover to a 15 second tire changeover can be considered a SMED journey.

SMED actions can take place having either external or internal components. Internal steps take place while the equipment or process is ceased. External steps take place while the equipment or process is going on. Both are essential and vital in accomplishing SMED.

In external components the main focus is on getting resources and tools geared up for a changeover. Considering sae example of Pit Stop, the pit crew does not start looking around for the right tires or the fuel hose when a race car drags in. In fine restaurants, chefs do not panic and have to obtain right beef for the burgers upon order. All of the resources are already available through thorough analysis of what is to be needed and then adequate resources and supplies available to produce the required result. This sort of analytical analysis is essential to developing the external part of SMED productive.

The other element is where the capturing the process proves remarkably important. Thorough analysis of how the team manages the elements of a process can support supervisors detect areas of improvements. The part of the process is recognizing internal elements that can be made external, such as for Pit Stop, having tires ready in the place as the requirement arise. Any process that can be done before the actual action takes place should be analysed ad identified. This helps speed up the process significantly.

To sum up, SMED can lead to operations that run more rapidly while also delivering quality. Toyota, pit stop crews and restaurants have been using SMED and it can work for any organization as well.

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Root Cause Analysis

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a very important tool in continuous improvement methodologies (eg Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma).  It examines the factors that cause non-conformance which must be permanently eliminated using a systematic approach and before implementing any process improvement. It is used to select a wide choice of proven approaches, tools and techniques that can address causes effectively. RCA is all about investigating and classifying the root causes into a workable solution and bringing reliability in the system. RCA is designed to help in identification of how an incident happened and at the same time answer why it happened.

Consider the example where an operator who missed the correct operation and did a wrong job, the reason for failure and recommendations such as training the worker on the procedure, reminding all other workers to be vigilant while doing work, and taking extra cautions on the job. Mistakes do occur naturally, but they can be traced back to find out the real causes.  Therefore, when we come across issues initial questions are asking the worker for procedure clarity, machines labels, training and so on. The answers to these questions definitely help determine the cause and avert recurrence. A systematic approach should include reviewing the procedure validation and poke-yoke (mistake proofing) to achieve perfection.

The RCA should be done systematically in the following four-steps:

1. Team formation: Depending upon the problem and magnitude, form a team to carry out the root cause analysis. The team should have representation from the customer, planning and operations.
2. Data collection: Collect data and gather all information to understand the process activities, inputs and outputs. Spend time to associate reasons with the effect.
3. Causal factor Analysis: Using the data, cause and effect analysis should be done and contributing factors identified. The causal factor diagram can be made to study logical test that describes the actions leading to the effect.
4. Root cause identification: Root causes can be determined after relating the causal factors with the effect. Questions on Why, How, Who, When and Where should further explore the factors that can be concluded as root causes of the problem.
5. Recommendations and implementation: Finally after selecting the root causes, the recommended actions and implementation time and responsibility need to be documented.

Root Cause Analysis Tools

Some tools to use in the RCA are 5-whys, fault-tree diagram and root cause map. To perform RCA with 5-whys, we start with the effect or problem and trace backward through enquiring what reason caused the failure. In each question, ask what caused it to happen. This chain of questions keeps on going until we get to the actionable task which is input to a process. The best way to conclude RCA is to get a list of three reasons for each “why”. Also, try to think with the action at the incident and the availability of data to support the evidence. The belief that a complex scenario created the incident will lead to better problem-solving. There can be multiple situations and respective actions that together develop the failure.

Fault tree diagram conducts fault tree analysis to determine the cause of failure and verifies the system reliability using a series of logical base. Based on a visual record that displays the logical relationships between effect and causes drives to the reason for failure. Fault tree diagram can help stakeholders understand the analysis easily and help in understanding design flaws and errors. It helps to prioritize problems and fix the reasons that contribute the highest. Below is an example of a Fault tree diagram for a car accident:

Another tool called Root cause map can help identify the root cause and interpret root cause analysis. Usually problem-solving is seen a puzzling activity and persons doing are not sure about the results in some cases. Root cause map can make a problem clearer as it is done till the basics using a structured diagram and therefore it is easy to learn and straightforward to implement. There are three key principles of in this activity:

1. Systems approach to find the root causes and risk mitigation.
2. Visual communication to show the team in a structured manner.
3. Simple and effective for the team

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Process Mapping

Process mapping is an important tool in any Operational Excellence initiative (Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, Design for Six Sigma DFSS, Kaizen, Continuous Improvement ). High Level process maps like Macro Maps and SIPOC Diagrams are used to graphically depict a process in its most simplified “big picture” state. A more detailed process map is required to clarify what actually happens in each process.

Mid-level process maps are the mapping tool of choice to clarify the current situation. Mid-level process maps identify waste and defects that can only be uncovered through intensive discussion and documentation by those who execute the process. By documenting steps using specific shapes and directional arrows, mid-level maps let a company visualize and better understand the existing opportunities for improvement. Activities related to waste and defects should not be accepted as “business as usual” and should be prime targets for improvement projects. As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and the mid-level process maps provide this picture.

Process Flow Diagram

A process flow diagram is a detailed process map that shows every step of a process, including the “hidden factory.” The “hidden factory” is an expression used for any unnecessary steps in the process which, though not documented, are routinely performed. Often, these unnecessary steps are performed in order to rework defective items. The process flow diagram uses standard flowchart symbols and nomenclature to communicate different types of work common to all different types of businesses and organizations. For example, a diamond shaped symbol in a process flow diagram represents a decision point.

A process flow diagram is used for many reasons like to create a detailed visual representation of the process flow, help identify rework loops and potential bottlenecks, identify serial and parallel process steps, identify internal supplier and customer relationships, identify inputs and outputs for each process activity. Process Flow Diagrams are made up of the following elements:

• Shapes that represent certain types of activities
• Connecting arrows that indicate flow of the work unit as it moves through the process
• Value Add and Non-Value Add markers on process steps

Swimlane Map

Swimlane maps, also known as Functional Process Maps, provide more detailed information focused around who completes each step and when each process step is completed. These maps provide a picture of the handoffs, relationships, and dependencies that occur between different functions and departments. The map gets its name from the horizontal rows used to designate a person, function, or department performing the process steps. The “lanes” created by the rows look like what you’d see in an Olympic swimming pool.

The handoffs are clearly depicted by the flow line crossing from one lane to the other. It is one of the most commonly-used mid-level maps in transactional and service processes and is excellent for illustrating roles and responsibilities such as who does what and in what timeframe and who makes key decisions. Swimlane maps also clearly show process steps that occur in series, or one after another, in addition to tasks performed in parallel.

This helps us map process complexities that wouldn’t be seen in another map. Because of this, swimlane maps generally show process flows that are broken, redundant, confusing and those that simply don’t work. And, swimlane maps can be used to display other pieces of information that are important in analyzing your process, like whenever the database is accessed for information on cycle times, value add or non-value add steps, queues, inventory, or bottlenecks.

The time line is an essential part of the swimlane map. It extends from left to right across the map and should provide a clear understanding of when the process steps occur. Phases are another important component of a swimlane map. Often, a map can become extremely complex. To simplify the map, it’s best to use high-level breakdown into phases or categories with the idea of helping those new to the map to understand it.

Recommendations

Some recommendations while using process maps. First, gather and collect any existing visual representations of your process and bring them to your mapping session. A lot of detail can be missed unless you can recall what actually takes place during each step of the process in question. It is always helpful to get copies of forms, procedures, and job aides. In today’s electronic world, consider printing screenshots so that you have a way to clarify the tasks during the mapping session. Use red and green dots to denote value add and non-value add process steps. This visual exercise identifies the amount of opportunity you have to improve the process.

Consider how to make the value add steps line up and how to arrange them to reflect the process’s sequence without all of the non-value add steps. Some facilitators use bright colored Post-it notes to show where improvement opportunities exist or where more information is available. Any visual cue you can add to the map will enhance its value to your project. Make sure one of your team goals is to attempt to reduce the number of swimlanes in a swimlane map. Every additional lane adds another layer of complexity and another opportunity for error, so your objective should be to remove as many as possible, without violating any requirements for separation of duties. Finally, look for opportunities where your process can run in parallel instead of in series in order to cut time from your process. Idle time is one of the eight types of waste, and process mapping can help you see where those times occur.

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