| by Laura Smith
Want to hear a joke about waste in government? Here goes: A guy stops at a gas station and, after filling his tank, buys a soda and stands next to his car to drink it. Nearby, two men are working alongside the road, repeating the same process over and over. The first man digs a hole two or three feet deep and then moves on. The other man comes along behind him and fills in the hole. After a few minutes of watching this curious behavior, the man with the soda walks up and asks what the workers are doing.
“Well, we work for the government, and we’re just doing our jobs,” they reply.
“But one of you is digging a hole and the other fills it up,” the man says. “You’re not accomplishing anything. Aren’t you wasting the taxpayer’s money?”
“You don’t understand,” says the first worker. “Normally there are three of us: me, Elmer and Leroy. I dig the hole, Elmer sticks the tree in and Leroy here puts the dirt back. Elmer’s job’s been cut, so now it’s just me and Leroy.”
These kinds of jokes are ubiquitous, and they’re funny because, unfortunately, they contain a grain of truth. Historically, government hasn’t been a model of efficiency, innovation or nimbleness. But, as Bob Dylan sings, the times, they are a-changin’.
Six Sigma has proven its worth to the manufacturing industry, causing the education, health care and service industries to sit up and take note. Governments, though, have been slower to respond to the methodology’s potential. This is understandable. Governments, whether local or federal, have huge and entrenched bureaucracies, and they lack the all-important market incentive for change. Waste in governmental processes is usually hidden in masses of paperwork, behind bureaucrats who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The predictable result has been more of the same in municipalities across the country.
But that’s beginning to change. Governments have taken note of the dramatic successes the manufacturing industry has enjoyed with Six Sigma, and an increasing number are implementing Six Sigma programs of their own. Implementing Six Sigma within government bureaucracies brings challenges that are specific to the public sector. Chief among these are reluctant employees and a lack of available funding for the necessary training. But those hesitant employees are often more easily convinced than their manufacturing counterparts that Six Sigma can work. There’s little of the “been there, done that” attitude that some private-sector employees have about yet another quality program.
The benefits of Six Sigma are often more prominent in local municipalities, but whether local or federal, the results are impressive.
Until three years ago, the U.S. Navy had annual cost increases of 5 to 10 percent of its budget, a situation that was unsustainable even for the military. The organization’s structure lacked effective internal communications, especially among its 32 maintenance facilities spread around the country.
“It was a stovepipe design, in which each of the depots was operating on its own,” says Captain Fred E. Cleveland, executive officer of the NAVAIR Depot in San Diego. “It wasn’t very efficient.”
The tide turned three years ago with the formation of the Naval Aviation Enterprise, which joined together the Navy’s labyrinthine management structures, and the subsequent implementation of a host of Six Sigma, theory of constraints (TOC) and lean projects. In August 2004, the Navy launched Task Force Lean, an initiative designed to support lean projects in the Navy’s NAVSEA command structure. This initiative also established a Lean Office, which is staffed full time.
The Navy commissioned three consulting firms to train its officers in Six Sigma, and plans to award Green and Black Belts in several rounds this year. There was a workshop on continuous improvement held in August 2004, attended by representatives from NAVSEA headquarters, warfare centers, shipyards and maintenance centers. Navy leaders in Washington, D.C., recently announced a new requirement that its commanding officers, executive officers, department heads, command master chiefs and senior enlisted advisors must complete lean Six Sigma and TOC training, noting that it will probably extend the requirement to other personnel as well.
In the three years since its implementation, lean, Six Sigma and TOC have had a huge effect on the NAVAIR Depot in San Diego. The depot employs 3,200 people and is charged with maintaining maritime aircraft between deployments, a task that requires it to maintain very specific schedules. Last year, the department refurbished 100 of the Navy’s F/A-18 Hornets and Super Hornets, as well as dozens of EA-CB Prowlers, E-2 Hawkeyes, S-3 Vikings and others--a total of 245 aircraft. NAVAIR’s innovative management program, Airspeed, has helped drive costs down to the point where the average cost for an hour of work on one of its sophisticated aircraft--including engineering and logistical support--is only $77, according to NAVAIR materials. Contrast this to local automotive repair shops that charge an average of $90 an hour.
Value-stream mapping and TOC studies showed Cleveland and other North Island Depot executives that there were serious bottlenecks in its production schedules, and that cycle times could be dramatically reduced. New, more efficient processes allowed high-tech fighter jets maintained at the facility to be completely refurbished in 134 days, instead of 192.
“That’s millions and millions of dollars that we’ve saved,” Cleveland says. “It’s really working well.”
The Naval Aviation Enterprise now meets regularly to share best practices--another product of the lean Six Sigma initiative, according to Cleveland.
“The Navy’s consumption [of re sources] is huge, but we’ve never com pared which departments and squadrons were consuming more or less because we’d never compared them like that before,” he says. “The meetings allow us to efficiently spread the word about how other squadrons are performing tasks, and to learn how we might do them better, at lower costs.”
Some results of Airspeed at the San Diego NAVAIR Depot include:
 3- to 5-percent reduction in operations costs, consistent with industry standards
Opportunity costs were recovered as a result of cutting work-in-progress from 31 Hornets to 19 and returning 12 Hornets (one squadron) to fleet flight operations
Increased efficiency allows the depot to invest 8,000 hours per jet in 134 days compared to 6,000 hours in 192 days.
Work is accomplished faster, with fewer people and requiring a smaller inventory of costly spare parts.
That governments are starting to mimic manufacturing industry quality systems comes as no surprise to Mikel Harry, whom some call the “Father of Six Sigma.” Along with engineer Bill Smith, Harry developed Six Sigma at Motorola in the early 1980s. Since then, he’s had calls from governments all over the world interested in implementing the methodology.
Harry has met with government officials from the United States, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia and Singapore to discuss implementing Six Sigma processes in everything from water quality and distribution, to electricity production, to state-run education systems.
“The question these agencies are asking is, ‘How can we shape the national agenda to support the corporate enterprise of our nation?’” Harry says. “‘How do we make our nation more attractive to businesses, more competitive?’ They see Six Sigma as a way to enhance the government to make it work more like a business, which is good for everyone.”
Harry has done extensive consulting with the federal government about the possibility of using Six Sigma to enhance U.S. intelligence gathering in the war on terrorism. Though prevented from discussing the possibilities, Harry has said previously that unleashing the discipline of Six Sigma into intelligence gathering would be very beneficial.
Outside of the profit-driven private sector, Six Sigma’s goals shift from making and saving money to improving cycle time. Many nonprofits realize significant cost savings after implementing Six Sigma, but that is more a result of improved cycle times and efficient supply-chain management than separate effects of their own.
“Governments don’t exist to make money, so in a way, it doesn’t matter to them what they do, as long as their costs are reduced,” Harry says. “Supply-chain management is essentially the same for government as it is for industry. For government, the goal is cycle time improvement.”
Fort Wayne, Indiana, is one of the first major U.S. cities to roll out Six Sigma. Mayor Graham Richard, elected to the position in 1999, had long been familiar with quality improvement. In 1991, while serving as a state senator, Richard helped start the TQM Network, a group of small to midsized companies that used benchmarks to improve their processes. Most of these companies were suppliers to General Electric, a company that famously enjoyed success with Six Sigma. GE’s suppliers in the TQM Network took note, and many of them implemented Six Sigma programs of their own, Richard says. When he became mayor, those successes were still fresh in his mind.
Fort Wayne’s official Six Sigma implementation began in February 2000, with the establishment of an executive council that would serve as a deployment team. Division and department managers attended a two-day training session on the basics of Six Sigma, and Richard created the position of quality enhancement manager, appointing the city’s first Black Belt to fill it. Soon after, five more city employees went through Black Belt training, and a member of the city’s executive council started developing Green Belt training.
Richard says he knew that there would be some “head scratching” among city employees when he introduced the methodology. The city’s first Six Sigma projects, permitting and pothole repair, were chosen for this reason because they were high profile and would provide noticeable results for Fort Wayne’s 250,000 residents. Both were problem areas: Before Six Sigma, it took an average of 50 days to get a city building permit, and it took up to four days for city workers to fill the many dangerous potholes that form on the city’s roads. Of course, before Six Sigma no one in the city’s offices knew these statistics, as no one had ever collectively examined them.
Richard’s goal was to get potholes fixed within 24 hours of their reporting. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” Richard remembers. “Everyone said, ‘You’ll never make it.’” Black Belts mapped the locations of potholes, finding the areas of the city where they happened most often and concentrated their efforts there. Today, most potholes are fixed within four hours after they’re reported.
In addition, Black Belts used flowcharts and maps to highlight redundancies in the city’s permitting system and slashed the amount of time it takes to issue a permit from 50 days to just 11 or 12.
The trick, Richard says, is for public agencies to institutionalize the notion that they are service providers, not bureaucrats.
“When you remember that fact, you’re telling people that you’re there to provide a service, just as anyone in the public sector would,” he says. “People don’t think of government as a business, but they should. We’re one of the biggest service organizations in the area.”
The often-substantial cost of Six Sigma training can be a deterrent to its successful implementation--especially for smaller companies and governments--but Richard found an innovative way to provide it. He used his connections with the TQM Network to have experienced Black Belts provide training, and then reached a deal with Six Sigma giants Raytheon and ITT to allow city workers to attend internal Six Sigma training sessions. A TQM Network Master Black Belt, Roger Hirt, served as a mentor to Fort Wayne’s fledging Six Sigma practitioners, and also offered Green Belt training.
Richard estimates that the training could have cost the city $50,000 per Black Belt, but it totaled less than a tenth of that sum.
In just five years, Six Sigma has revolutionized Fort Wayne’s city government. City workers have completed 60 Six Sigma projects, which have saved upward of $10 million, and there are now 35 Six Sigma belts on the staff. Fort Wayne’s school district is now implementing Six Sigma, and the city gets monthly requests for information from other public administrators interested in modeling Fort Wayne’s success in their own cities.
Fort Wayne’s Six Sigma-facilitated improvements include:
Variation elimination and bottleneck reduction, allowing the fire department inspectors to perform 23 percent more reinspections annually, without any staff increases.
Parks department workers, led by a Six Sigma Black Belt, designed an experiment to determine if city trees were trimmed at the right frequencies, reducing complaint calls from citizens by 33 percent.
Improved accounting in the transportation engineering department freed $150,000 that had previously been tied up due to inaccurate estimations of project costs.
On-the-job injuries have plummeted to one of the lowest rates in the country.
Cost-saving incentives are important to innovative employees, and in private firms, they often come in the form of cash bonuses. Because the city doesn’t have the money to provide them, Richard and his quality council provide “prizes” in the form of laptop computers and other useful tools for departments that save significant amounts of money for the city.
With governments getting smarter about quality and trimming their processes with lean precision, we may soon see the day when private-sector companies look for new executives in city halls and government buildings--and many of those executives will bring with them a fundamental understanding of the benefits that Six Sigma can deliver.
Laura Smith is Quality Digest’s assistant editor.
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