NASA's Lean Six Sigma
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Administrative and Technical Process Improvements
Industry:
NASA
Problem
NASA did not embark on its Lean Six Sigma (LSS) journey in response to some pressing problem or serious issue. Rather, LSS got its start in NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center as a result of an employee-driven grassroots effort to bring industry best practices in process improvement to bear on specific NASA administrative and technical processes. This took place in 2005. Since then, LSS has spread to other space flight and scientific/technical centers within NASA. (1)
Approach
NASA has used a traditional approach to implementing LSS. This included benchmarking several different approaches and then adopting a “tailored” approach that best serves its mission, goal, objectives and culture. This approach is known as LSS “NASA Style.” It is built on “value from the customer’s perspective” and works to ensure that the “voice of the customer” is carefully collected and considered in all NASA projects.
Additionally, NASA has established a formal program to train select employees in LSS procedures from the most basic to the most advanced. Individual training courses known as Champion, Green Belt, Black Belt and Master Black Belt have been offered in addition to executive overview training. Through early 2010, nearly 1,300 individuals had received this training. Following training, personnel were assigned to work on specific process improvement projects of importance to NASA. More than 300 of these projects were completed by early 2010. (2)
Results
From the project work, NASA has achieved some very impressive results. In aggregate, LSS-enabled improvements have returned slightly more than 100 times the financial investment NASA has made in implementing LSS. Some specific improvement examples are:
** Agency records retrieval time has been reduced by 98.8% (456 hours to 5.25 hours).
** The cycle time for disposition of shuttle-related property and assets has been reduced by 56% (103 days to 45) and the number of steps in the process has been reduced by 66% (67 steps to 23).
** The process for new purchase requests (PR) has been reduced from 58 days per PR to 13 days (a 78% reduction)
** Within the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, the cycle time for processing PRs has been reduced by 89% and the process steps, by 81%. Combined, these reductions enabled PR-related labor hours in this office to decrease from 42,309 per year to 6,428 (87% improvement).
** For processing foreign national visitors, man-hours have been reduced from 31,410 per year to 12,438 (60% improvement). For issuing contractor on-site badges, cycle time has been reduced by 85%.
** Regarding engineering projects, inter-stage production flow time for the Ares rocket has been reduced by 32% and flow time for the Ares common bulkhead bonding development process has been reduced by 35%. (3)
