Few college staffs likely have embraced Lean Six Sigma quite like the University of California – Santa Barbara. Not only have employees learned the value of earning a Green Belt certification, they’ve also put it to use in projects across the school’s campus.
That’s a good thing for any university, anywhere. As noted in a news release by Matt Hall, the Chief Information Officer for UC Santa Barbara, applying Lean Six Sigma methodology is important in higher education as schools face “extraordinary pressures to deliver an ever-increasing level of student and research success.”
It’s another example of schools getting involved more with training students and faculty in Lean and Six Sigma, such as the rural school district in Ohio where every graduating high school senior earns a Green Belt. It’s also led to many projects, such as the university students in New York using process improvement techniques at a local hospital.
Why the Staff Chose Six Sigma
In total, 16 members of the UC Santa Barbara staff chose to earn their Green Belt in Lean Six Sigma, learning the tools and techniques that help eliminate variation and improve processes. Earning the certificate involved taking five days of courses as well as supplemental online work. Each UC Santa Barbara faculty member also had to complete a program that involved the use of Lean Six Sigma methodology.
Why earn the Green Belt? Because the University wanted the faculty to speak the same language about process improvement, something the school wants to emphasize in the coming years. Introducing as many people as possible to the principles and methods of Lean Six Sigma accomplishes that goal.
However, the success outstripped their expectations. The Green Belt candidates, eager to put their new skills to work on the required project, ended up making quite a few improvements to the UC Santa Barbara campus.
Bike Impounds at UC Santa Barbara
One of the issues taken on by the Green Belt candidates at UC Santa Barbara involved the impounding of bicycles by the campus police. Students were complaining about the time spent having to retrieve their bikes from the impound.
On the surface, one of the delays seemed to involve paperwork. The community service officers (CSO) who impounded the bikes are students who work as liaisons between the police and students. They often put off the paperwork needed to document the impound until after a person came to get the bike, leading to longer waits.
Further analysis showed that the primary time waster involved the time it took the CSO to locate and bring back a bike from the impound lot. They also found that the printer used for impound paperwork was in another building.
That’s quite a few process problems, including some of the Eight Wastes of Lean, such as unnecessary waiting, over processing, transportation and non-value added processing.
Ultimately, the project team of Green Belts called for moving a printer into the same building, keeping newly impounded bicycles on campus, streamlining the paperwork system and better organizing the impound lots.
They expect to cut wait times by 35 minutes. The goal is to put all the system overhauls into place before summer.
One of the teachers who worked on the project called the possibilities of Lean Six Sigma “pretty eye-opening.”
How important is the philosophy of Lean Six Sigma to teachers at the school? Perhaps that’s best summed up by a quote the news release uses. It’s from the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s “through the Looking Glass”: “You see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
