Lean Six Sigma Training

Yesterday the students of IRE had Lean Six Sigma training. This training was provided by Cleveland Cliffs, who we will be partnering with. Ken Stocco, who is Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, led the training. This training was very beneficial to us as a class. Lean Six Sigma is a system that Cliffs uses to reduce the defects in their products and operations. This training will be helpful to our school functions and will greatly benefit our careers as engineers. Lean is a methodology that was developed to optimize the automotive industry. Six Sigma is a system created to eliminate product defects in industry. Now these two ideas have been combined and adopted by all kinds of industry, Cleveland Cliffs being one of them. Lean Six Sigma puts a huge emphasis on reducing waste to optimize production and save the company money. Ken taught us several ways to identify waste and ways to reduce or eliminate that waste. We also learned techniques to make a meeting run more efficiently. This will help us in our office because we have different types of meetings and with training, we will be able to constantly improve our operations. One of the points that I thought was interesting was Kaizen events. Kaizen events are small continuous improvements that help make operations run more efficient. One Kaizen event we did to better our office was a room configuration. We went through the entire office and organized the whole thing. The room configuration consisted of finding a permanent home for everything. Also items should be placed in a logical place, and have a purpose for being in that place. The Lean Six Sigma training was greatly beneficial to us as future engineers. A big part of engineering is making things better and more efficient and the training we received is all about doing that. IRE greatly appreciated that Cleveland Cliffs put on the class and our instructor, Ken, did a great job presenting the information. We all look forward to learning more about Lean Six Sigma as the program progresses.

Proofed by Christine and Austin