When Airman 1st Class Cole Cargill finished hanging the Mental Health Flight’s new idea board, he started something that could potentially improve his flight’s business practices and its service to customers.
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The 95th Medical Group hung 16 idea boards around its various sections to solicit ideas from its work force that could help improve efficiency in the way the medical group serves its patients.
The boards hung at the medical group are designed with the five “rocks” related to the 95th Millennium Development Goals’ (MDG) mission and vision.
The five rocks represent customer service, patient care, education and training, medical readiness and fitness, and expanded services.
The idea boards are just a portion of Edwards’ Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century (AFSO21) program.
AFSO21, a standardized approach for improving work processes and combat capabilities across the Air Force, fosters a culture of continuous process improvement, and involves every total force airman in developing that culture.
“We’re looking for ideas to improve the way we do things, mainly to eliminate waste and nonvalue-added steps in a process,” says Staff Sgt. Cynthia Atilano, 95th MDG AFSO21 lead. “We don’t want to shut down any idea.”
Atilano says each AFSO21 representative from the medical group meets once a month to capture all the ideas and decide which ones can be handled locally and are logistically sound. Those ideas are then passed up to group leadership for review and possible action.
“What’s good about the 95th MDG is that there is a definite buy in from leadership,” says Atilano.
AFSO21 is a term coined by Air Force senior leadership to represent not only a program to institutionalize continuous process improvement, but also to describe a new way of thinking about the Air Force. The program is based on both lean and Six Sigma business process improvement tools. These tools were developed chiefly in the private sector to focus on increasing value to customers, save time and money, reduce waste, and improve quality.
A process is made lean by reengineering it to eliminate steps that add no value to the end product or by combining process steps to save time. For instance, moving tools and supplies closer to a work area to reduce the number of footsteps workers must take to complete their jobs.
Six Sigma seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects (i.e., errors) and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. It uses a set of quality management methods, including statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization (e.g., Black Belts and Green Belts) who are experts in these methods.
Along with the idea boards, 95th MDG sponsored an AFSO21 Green Belt certification course, which concluded Dec. 17, 2010. AFSO21 volunteers and representatives from both the 95th Air Base Wing and 412th Test Wing attended the course to learn how to cut out waste in their respective business processes.
“The course served a two-part purpose,” says Master Sgt. Jenny Broder, 95th Aerospace Medicine Squadron superintendent. “The first was to certify students from across both wings in AFSO21 and provide them with all the tools to start their journey for certification as a Green Belt. In the curriculum there is a requirement to do a project to practice their skills. What we did is combined the academics with a rapid-improvement event, which was a cervical cancer screening project to help us better manage the screenings.”
Although 95th MDG sponsored this particular AFSO21 course, the diverse class took away various common tools to help them improve the processes in their respective units.
“The beauty of AFSO21 is that it’s not geared only toward things you are comfortable with or knowledgeable about,” says Broder. “You utilize a set of tools and processes to apply to any situation. What they’re going to take out of it is not necessarily the event or the new process but the knowledge of the tools to use.”
Graduates of Green Belt AFSO21 courses can move on to Black Belt courses and the final Master Black Belt courses.
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