Analyse Phase

Brainstorming

The Analyse phase of the project commenced on the 20th Jan. The above tools were agreed upon and then we kicked off with a Brainstorming session with the PB's from the outer line and included the PB's in the Generic area. Our reason for including the second group was because they had a lot of knowledge when it came to the types of issues we were seeing on our line. The manufacturing engineer,the BPI person and myself conducted the session. We started the session by explaining to the PB's what we were doing and what expected outcome we required which was to get as many ideas as we could on the issue of kinks.  We agreed a half hour time slot for this session and we decided to go with a structured process. Everyone in the room took a post it and a biro and wrote down what they thought could be causing the kinks on the units. The structured process of Brainstorming proved to be the better way to go because the PB's in the room had never done this before and we knew that we would not get as many ideas from them if we opted for the unstructured process of Brainstorming because they would not have been as forthcoming. All the information was gathered and most of the PB's had written 2 or 3 ideas which was then added to the below Brainstorming diagram which is currently used by my company. 

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Affinity Diagram 

The next step in the process was to look at all the ideas and group them in to categories. We came up with five categories and inputted them into an Affinity Diagram. The below diagram shows the areas that are causing the most kinks on the product which is handling and the second biggest area is the method of which the product is being processed. These were the areas we agreed to work on in the Improve phase of the project. Both of these tools were easy to work with, unlike the process map which was time consuming, and both tools delivered the expected outcome which was to point out the areas in the process to work on.

FMEA 

Below is a snap shot of station 6  of the FMEA. This FMEA was constructed by the team and we  included the Product Development team. This station had to be carefully assessed because it was new to our business. We had to ensure that we captured all failure modes. Each failure mode was then assessed for root cause and a decision was made by the team on the effects it could have on a patient. We also  incorporated the ideas from the Brainstorming session when considering the failure modes for this station. This tool took quite a long time to construct and although there are FMEA's for other products in our company this product is quite unique to our business. The FMEA was constructed from the start of the process right through to the end of the process which was beyond the scope of this project.