Lean Six Sigma and The Curious Case of Smart Cities

Cities are the center of all our aspirations. We want them Smart, Lean, Functional, Consistent, Rewarding and Beautiful. This is a very tall order to achieve, considering the subjective nature of expectations and a lack of will and or capability residing with the policy-makers and urban design specialists. Overwhelmed, is what often the policy makers observe getting, when asked about efficiencies that need to be built in public policy execution.

The concept of Smart Cities became a movement across the world a decade ago, when subsequent governments drove their policies and campaigns on building smart cities. Delivering on Smart Cities ambition has data management, automation, efficiency, process thinking and quality at the center of planning.

One field of study that can bring structure to planning and executing for a smart city is the framework of Lean Six Sigma. And the ‘where to start’ conundrum is aptly solved by the Principles and Methodology of Lean Six Sigma. This, combined methodology, building on the principles of Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma is a solution that can help in building for efficiencies.

What is a Smart City?

To qualify as a smart city, a city needs to drive efficiencies in a number of key areas service to its citizens. The planning for any city to become ‘Smart’ is about gathering facts on ‘Citizen Moments’ vis-a-vis city services.

What is a Citizen Moment?

A ‘citizen moment’ could be defined as any moment where a citizen ‘interacts’ with a government system. For example, voting for a mayor, buying a public transport ticket, filing of taxation et al.

Each citizen moment is an opportunity to design efficiencies in order to reduce the cost of that interaction for all stakeholders. In a typical scenario the stakeholders would be service providers and citizens in the micro-context and the interaction of these moments in Macro-contexts. This system of defining citizen moments, designing automations for each step, reducing defects through continuous improvement can be enabled with the methodologies of Lean Six Sigma.

The Core Competencies of Smart Cities to Build for

To define what could be the core competencies for a city to improve on are defined aptly in the research article ‘Applying Lean Thinking to Smart Cities’ 1

THE ISO 37120

The Industry Standards are also built to design on ambition and create a standard for engagement. The International Standards Organization (ISO) on its part has devised a Standard for Smart Cities namely ‘ISO: 37120’. The key themes/competencies to build for within this rating are:

ISO Rating: 37120 | SMART CITY COMPETENCIES	Population and Social Conditions
Economy	Recreation	Water
Education,	Safety	Urban Planning
Environment,	Solid Waste	Transportation
Climate Change	Sport and Culture	Urban/Local Agriculture and Food Security
Finance	Telecommunications	Urban planning
Fire and Emergency Response	Governance	Health
Housing	Energy	Wastewater

The aspirations from a city can only be met when a concerted effort to drive policy action is made a priority and the citizens become a part of the movement or in some cases are made a part of the movement.

Principles of Lean Six Sigma and the overarching suggestions to drive innovation

• Work for the customer (Identify the value)

The primary goal of any change you want to implement should be to deliver maximum benefit to the customer. Establish a clear standard of quality early on that’s defined by what the customer or market demands. In our case, it is important to Observe, Record, Define and Suggest at every ‘Citizen Moment’. 

The aim is to listen to the customer and empathise with his needs. The ambition needs to be designing for least friction for the customer rather than forcing a particular action. Keeping the customer at the centre involves capturing the data once at a national level and designing a national level block-chain for verification and removing redundancy of data.

• Find Your Problem and Focus On It (Pinpoint problems in Value Chain)

During the re-tooling processes, it’s easy to get caught up in a whirlwind of desired changes and lose focus on the initial problem. Gather data that shows you where your specific problem area lies and concentrate on refining only that area of your business. Any attempt to broadly alter the company or change the product will likely derail the LSS process.

In our perspective, the ‘Citizen Moment’ of interaction is where we need to concentrate at a city management level. Each department can be given clear goals to drive research to find the moments of friction. Gamifying for finding these moments of truths by building a rewards mechanism for fact finding can give impetus for the same and should be the aim.

• Remove variation and bottlenecks

Once you’ve identified the problem, it’s time to look for ways to decrease opportunities for defects. These openings often come in the form of long, intricate processes that leave significant room for mistakes and waste. Streamlining or removing these functions is an excellent way to achieve quality control and efficiency.

The system always has a moment of input and a moment of output, and in the middle are moments of truth. It is here that one finds errors, bottlenecks, mistakes/defects and waste. Working to reduce for quality in each moment is what can create value where there is waste. Automation and reducing redundancy should be the aim.

• Communicate clearly and train team members

Lean Six Sigma fundamentals require that all team members are versed in LSS, know the goals of the project, and are informed of its progress. Six Sigma methodology can cause tremendous change and requires specialized focus on the part of management. Advanced certifications in Six Sigma are critically important for reducing the risk of project failure and ensuring that the entire process runs smoothly.

Training each decision maker in Six Sigma is imperative to the success at all levels of designing for smart city management. This framework can guide policymakers to design systems, processes, products and services to reduce redundancy and increase speed of delivery. Getting them ready with the apt training is important and reducing the learning curve should be the aim.

• Be flexible and responsive and ready for continuous improvement

Change and Lean Six Sigma go hand-in-hand. A process or function that is identified as faulty or inefficient, must be refined or removed. Clinging to a failing approach is not an option with LSS. Change and change management can be challenging and painful, but it’s a small price to pay for what every business leader strives for: a leaner, stronger, more competitive company.

Change management, Continuous Improvement, and Lean Six Sigma are three processes that work for hand – in – hand in designing for efficiency. As the target for continuous improvement is ever-changing the process of lean six sigma needs to be made the ethos of running the cities.

Anything is possible with technology. And the enablers for Lean Six Sigma have also evolved a great deal.

Cloud computing, Industrial IOT and artificial intelligence (AI) has made Lean Six Sigma techniques, more relevant and designing clear systems with human centered approach to design has developed leaps and bounds.

“It used to be this stuff was done by trial and error, and then with very limited algorithms, written by the Six Sigma Black Belts using factorial analysis in Minitab. But it was a small data set, with 10 variables, perhaps. Modern analytics tools allow us to process much bigger data sets, and to apply machine learning to make the process smarter.”

Greg Kinsey, vice president of industrial solutions at Hitachi Vantara

Bringing in efficiencies and designing for systems and processes to reduce waste and defects can provide a ready framework for smart cities. Gamifying performance-based rewards could foster what we call a blitzkrieg on defects, redundancy, and waste. A case in point is the direction taken by government of Estonia:

Source:

1. Matos, João & Santos, Vitor. (2018). Applying Lean Thinking to Smart Cities: Environmental Sustainability and Resources Waste Reduction. Journal of Advanced Management Science. 174-178. 10.18178/joams.6.3.174-178.
2. Purdue University Blog