SCENE
EXPERIENCES OF A LEAN SIX SIGMA GREEN BELT PROJECT During and after my Lean Six Sigma (LSS) crash course in München in May 2018, I had mixed feelings regarding the upcoming Lean Six Sigma project. I was lucky to have landed a job in the Finnish worldleading company Konecranes, which specializes in the
Antti Sinkkonen Local Group Lappeenranta
manufacturing and service of cranes and lifting equipment for ports, shipyards and other industrial environments. However, I felt quite uncertain, as it would be the first time I would work as a project leader and have the true responsibility of a project and its outcome. I also knew that I would be on a very tight schedule and working with products that I had never seen before, in a totally new industrial environment. Looking back now it sounds very interesting and an excellent opportunity to learn, as it was! Assembled horizontal gear reducer Currently I am working in the Strategy Quality Development team of the company, which for example arranges Lean
The title of my project is “Capacity assessment & FMEA
Six Sigma trainings for the whole company world-wide and
analysis of gear housing machining”, FMEA stands for Failure
manages the overall quality development processes and
Mode and Effect Analysis. I am focusing on the machining
projects through all business units. Originally, I applied only
of the gear cases e.g. housings. Currently, there are two
for a Green Belt project but ended up doing a lot more than
large machining centers used to machine the casted gear
just the project: I have been conducting a comprehensive
housings so they can be assembled into a ready gearbox.
data analysis as a part of a Master Black Belt project and
In picture two you can see a Burkhardt+Weber machining
developing a Lean Six Sigma project portfolio management
center which is similar to what the gear factory uses. The
tool for Konecranes.
objective of my project is to evaluate the available capacity
All of the above has helped me with my own project
in terms of theoretical working hours and actual machining
and working parallel on something else other than my
hours in order to reflect upon whether there is enough
own project has allowed me to look at the project from
capacity to meet customer demand in the long run. The
different angles and gain knowledge from people around
other part of the project is to assess the risks involved in
me. For all you future Green Belts, I suggest to occasionally
the machining process that may cause long-term machine
take your eyes from your own work and spend some time
downtime and thus have a big financial impact on the whole
thinking about what you are really doing and trying to
company.
achieve. Headless pounding and frustration will not get you anywhere, I can tell you that. The project that I am conducting is for the Hyvinkää gear factory (CHG). The gear factory produces gearboxes and transmission parts of gears for industrial equipment. As you might know, port cranes are gigantic and the largest ones can lift 1200 tons high in the air. As it can be understood the gearboxes of these kind of products cannot be small either. Here’s a picture of a gear box. To give you some scale, the largest ones I have so far seen at the factory are some three meters long and weigh up to 1000 kg, so certainly we are not talking about small objects. Burkhardt+Weber machining center
22 ESTIEM Magazine | 55th issue - Leadership in the 21st century