Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification Course

Apply kaizen to drive continuous improvement and cultivate an improvement culture that boosts quality, efficiency, and profitability, defined as change for good with Toyota origins.

Explore the kaizen philosophy as a long-term, continuous improvement plan that engages workers at all levels with five s and standardized work to drive small, incremental gains.

Embrace kaizen principles to continuously improve issues, modify old concepts, involve everyone in problem solving, apply five whys to root causes, and pursue economical, incremental improvements.

Learn the kaizen pdca cycle—plan, do, check, act—and how hypotheses drive improvements, with standardization and root-cause analysis when results fail to validate.

Implement kaizen through a structured, continuous improvement approach driven by employee involvement. Identify and solve problems with small incremental changes, pilot implementation, audits, and standardization.

Discover the foundation of one piece flow for lean six sigma black belt practitioners, emphasizing continuous flow in a cellular environment and pull systems to cut waste.

Contrast push versus pull systems; produce only when downstream requests to reduce inventory, wait times, transport, and rework, while improving flow and throughput.

Understand connected flow and implement one-piece flow to connect each process step, moving products with essentially no waiting and zero work in progress.

Evaluate one piece flow readiness by ensuring consistent parts, minimal changeovers, suitable product units, repeatable process times, and near 100% uptime scalable to takt time; otherwise use a buffer system.

Assess conditions for one piece flow by ensuring consistent good parts, very short changeovers, repeatable process times, and near 100% uptime, scalable to takt time, else use buffers.

Size equipment to customer demand for one-piece flow, using smaller, slower machines; set up quickly, with automatic signaling to support a wide product mix while reducing inventory and waste.

Explore tools for one piece flow, including PK analysis tables and process routes tables. Use standard operations and quick changeover to plan, reduce waste, and lower costs.

Learn cellular manufacturing, where cells group similar parts to cut setup and handling, reduce inventory, and speed production, guided by group technology, families of paths processing, and supervisory computer.

A cell combines people, equipment, and workstations in process flow for a family of products. Uses right-sized equipment, cross-trained staff, and a C or U shape for monitoring.

Implement cellular manufacturing to shorten lead times, reduce setup and batch sizes, and lower waiting times and in-process inventory through cell specialization and group tooling designed for part families.

Map value streams to implement cell manufacturing with continuous flow, decide the cell type (product focused, group technology, or mixed model), and calculate tax time against demand.

Explore how process control and statistical process control (SPC) in manufacturing use statistical techniques to monitor process behavior, meet specifications, and enhance customer value.

Discover how statistical process control (SPC) monitors quality and variability to keep processes in control, applies to any process with measurable conforming products, and prevents defects through early detection.

Compare statistical process control and engineering process control, and see how set points and graphs guide quality via sensors and feedback.

Assess a process's ability to meet specifications by calculating CP, CPK, and PK indices, using specification limits and process standard deviation to gauge variability.

Learn how to assess a process's ability to meet specifications using CP and CPK indices, based on specification limits, mean, and three sigma, with CPU and CPL interpretations.

Learn to assess process capability with CPK and CP values, including negative values indicating out of customer specification. Compute CP, CPK, and capability ratio using moving range, subgroups, and D2.

Use control charts to monitor process changes over time, identifying the central line and upper and lower control limits, and distinguishing in control from out of control variation.

Explore control charts: variable and attribute; use bar and R charts for variable data, and U, C, NP, and P charts for attribute data, with fixed or variable sample sizes.

Explore attribute control charts, including p charts, to monitor pass/fail units and the proportion defective over time with varying sample sizes, and learn when to use them to assess stability.

Differentiate specification limits from control limits and explain how control limits from process data indicate in-control status on control charts, while specification limits reflect customer targets.

Identify overall equipment effectiveness (oe) as the global standard metric for manufacturing productivity by measuring availability, performance, and quality, and analyzing losses to drive waste reduction and process improvement.

Learn how the three oee factors—availability, performance, and quality—guide improvement by analyzing all-time, plant production time, and fully productive time. Identify losses—schedule, availability, performance, and quality—to calculate oee.

Master how to calculate overall equipment effectiveness using simple and preferred methods, and quantify availability, performance, and quality to derive OEE.

Apply a case study of calculating overall equipment effectiveness from shift data, including availability, performance, and quality, using downtime, run time, ideal cycle time, and counts.

Implementing oee involves capturing detailed loss data, defining a pilot area and constraints, choosing measurement methods, and tracking the six big losses to improve availability, performance, and quality.

Improve overall equipment effectiveness by aligning information, decision, and action to identify constraints, collect accurate data, and execute two week improvement cycles toward tangible results.

Identify and reduce the six big losses—equipment failures, setups and adjustments, idling and minor stops, reduced speed, process defects, and reduced yield—using a concrete framework to target improvements.

Drive total productive maintenance through proactive and preventive upkeep to maximize equipment efficiency, share maintenance responsibility with operators, and drive uptime by eliminating breakdowns, defects, and accidents.

Learn the eight pillars of total productive maintenance, from focused improvements and autonomous maintenance to training, safety, and office lean practices that boost equipment reliability, quality, and productivity.

Identify a pilot area and target equipment to implement TPM. Execute autonomous maintenance, audits, and measurements to address major losses with focus improvement and introduce proactive maintenance techniques.

Explore how overall equipment effectiveness, an OEE metric developed to support TPM, measures true production time through availability, performance, and quality to target perfect production.

Benchmarking defines a reference point to measure and compare performance against best-in-class standards, driving continuous improvement by analyzing how others achieve superior results and applying smart, measurable goals.

Explore the four benchmarking categories—internal, competitive, functional, and generic—and learn how organizations compare internal operations, competitive benchmarking on a specific product, similar functions, and generic processes to improve performance.

Explore process, project, performance, and strategic benchmarking to identify best operating practices from many companies, guiding planning, scheduling, and controlling projects with focus on price, technical quality, speed, and reliability.

Benchmarking sequences guide organizations to determine current practices, identify best practices, analyze and model improvements, and continuously repeat the cycle with internal and external partners.

Error proofing eliminates root causes to prevent defects and create an error-free production environment. Poka yoke guides countermeasures to avoid careless mistakes through confirmation in advance and training.

Prevent defects at the source in a lean organization to deliver defect-free products, count defects, and perform root-cause analysis to prevent recurrence and support smaller batch sizes.

Identify the four elements of error proofing: general inspections, 100% inspection, error proofing devices, and immediate feedback—and apply them to prevent defects and enable rapid corrective action.

Explore human error through the cognitive psychology perspective, distinguishing mistakes from slips, and describe a two-step action process—intent determination and action execution—to prevent errors through error-proofing.

Explore four error-proofing approaches—mistake prevention, mistake detection, source inspection, and preventing the influence of mistakes—plus practical tactics to reduce complexity, symmetrical designs, and process steps.

Use cost-effective error proofing to reduce defects and realize return on investment. It is not a stand-alone solution; it requires clever design and multiple approaches tailored to each process.

Cultivate a blame-free culture and use event reporting and root cause analysis to drive mistake proofing, corrective actions, simulation, and design improvements.

Meet rising customer demands for quality and reliability by shifting from late-stage testing to designing for quality early in development, using probabilistic reliability modeling to ensure robust products.

Apply FMEA to anticipate and mitigate failures early in design, boosting product reliability and safety through a stepwise analysis of potential failure modes and their effects.

Define failure as a state where a system, process, or product cannot meet its intended objective, and show defect analysis decomposing failures into components to form fmea.

Explore the five types of FMEA, including system, design, process, service, and software FMEA, and how they assess global functions, components, manufacturing, service, and software functions.

Learn how to use FMEA to define design requirements, identify failure modes, and design them out to improve reliability, safety, and process performance.

Improve product and process reliability and quality, increase customer satisfaction, and identify and eliminate potential failure modes on time with FMEA, while documenting risk and catalyzing cross-functional teamwork.

Implement FMEA as a living document at the start of a new product or process and update it as changes in design, operating conditions, regulations, or customer feedback arise.

Describe the product or process with a block diagram, identify failure modes and their effects, assess causes and controls, and prioritize actions using risk priority numbers.