What are CPI, LEAN anyway? Published Oct. 5, 2006 By Michael "MAQ" Maquet 43rd Airlift Wing Smart Operations Office POPE AIR FORCE BASE, N.C. -- You may have asked the question above recently at Pope . If so, let me answer it. Let's look at CPI first. CPI stands for Contin-uous Process Improvement. It is not a new term in industry, but it is relatively new in the Department of Defense. The term is used to describe a very important new implementation effort across all the military services. When DoD started looking at what process improvement tools the services were using in 2005, they found that the services had been offered a tool box full of different tools to improve processes. They further discovered that each service, in traditional fashion, had selected different tools to use. The Air Force selected LEAN. The Army selected Six Sigma. The Navy/Marines selected Theory of Constraints. The individual services were only common in the use of one sub-tool, Benchmarking. This individualism was acceptable when they started in 2001, but it made it very difficult to share ideas and techniques and even just communicate between the services in 2005, because each tool used different principles and terminology. Therefore DoD accepted the task to generate a standard approach to process improvement that could be used across all the services. They selected the title of CPI because all the tools focus on processes improvement, and the goal was established to make this effort continuous, thus CPI came into military terminology. CPI is not a magical term. It is an effort to combine the process improvement efforts in all the services in DoD and use one common title. The DoD CPI Guide was published in February 2006 to standardize terminology and approaches across DoD. Now let's look at LEAN. Since the Air Force started using the LEAN tool back in 2001, we still see that emphasis in Air Force CPI activities. LEAN is not an acronym, but is a tool that eliminates waste in any process. It also contains the Value Stream Mapping sub-tool that almost all process improvement tools use in one form or another very early in the effort. The principles of LEAN are: - Value: Value in any process can only be defined by the customer/user. - Value Stream: A value stream is a list of all the steps in a process. The steps are categorized as value added or non-value added. The purpose of generating a Value Stream map is to see the waste in the process. - Flow: Flow is the opposite of batch processing. Instead of working products or documents in batches of five or 10, flow tries to complete one item and move it on to the next station so more value can be added to it. - Pull: Pull means only supplying building what as it is used. The best example of pull is a grocery store, when a customer pulls a product off a shelf, a signal is sent through the distributor to the factory to make another one and is done in real time. - Perfection: Perfection is where we get the concept of continuous in CPI. We don't just improve a process once and we are done. CPI must be a continuous effort to make processes better. We should never accept the status quo. Now that you know what CPI and LEAN are, get involved! This effort gives all of us another opportunity to challenge the way we do work, the AFIs that don't make sense or are outdated, the work that takes us away from our important missions. To get started, contact your group representative or the wing AFSO21 office at 394-2794.