Introduction
This paper is review of DMAIC process used in an Industry to minimize the Rework in Belt. In this paper I will mention the significance importance of DMAIC process used for continuous improvement in many leading manufacturing firm. In the Belt Manufacturing Industry (Junankar and Shende 2011), mainly the raw material is rubber; others are biased fabric, and cord. Due to large consumption of raw material was not taken seriously as rubber is reusable. Other Operational wastages in the Belt manufacturing process are- top surface rework, printed label rework, cog rework, pin hole rework, fabric rework and other reworks. Out of these rework, fabric rework is observed continuously in REC Belt from past time and it affects the rate of rework.
So the task was to minimize the fabric rework, rate of production can be maximizing. And project the minimization of fabric rough problem to reduce the total number of rework. They followed the DMAIC process within a framework. The five DMAIC phases and key tools used in each phase are listed of the process as given briefly as under.
Phase I: D = Define - Pareto Analysis; Project Charter.
Phase II M = Measure - Descriptive Statistics; Process Capability Analysis.
Phase III A= Analyze -; Fish-Bone Diagram, FMEA.
Phase IV: I = Improve – Experimentation of New Process.
Phase V: C= Control. Council Meeting.
Details explanation of each Phase:
Define Phase: this was the first phase of the DMAIC Six Sigma project in which they used Pareto analysis to identify and prioritize projects that will be worked on as part of continuous improvement process in the company. Later they used a project charter to organize the major project categories.
Tools used in this project in this phase: Pareto analyses, Project charter, flow Map
My comments: they used Pareto analyses which is very efficient tool understand the causes of the problem and priorities them based on higher impact to the firm. I think Pareto gives us a “where to start” in the improvement phase which is very good strategy in the design phase. In the Project charter they completely explained the project with problem statement, project objective statement, project scope and limitation.
Measure Phase: this is important phase in the DMAIC process, in this case they measure the normality test for all the products, cost of poor quality, and process capability. The performance of the belt cutting process was calculated with respect fabric rework and calculated DPMO which was 117338, which gives 88% yielding.
Tools used: process capability index.
My comments: three important parameters were used to assess the losses in rework of the process. Process capability give them idea of their process yielding.
Analyses phase: The analyze phase is the third step in the DMAIC improvement cycle. This section describes the work and result of the cause and effect diagram to identify probable causes. This phase describes the potential causes identified which have the maximum impact on the operational wastages they used cause and effect diagram to sort out the possible causes and FMEA to priorities them once the root causes found in the problem they are easier to be solved.
Tools used: FMEA, Cause and effect diagram
My comments: this phase actually give them idea about the possible causes of rework in the process, the fish-bone diagram actually gave them idea what could possibly go wrong in the process. I think the possible limitation I have noticed in this phases that they didn't have used any statistical values like p-value or any line