Bridgestone Americas designs, manufactures and sells passenger, light truck, commercial truck, agricultural and off-road tires to the original equipment and replacement markets. Bridgestone began their Six Sigma journey in July of 2004, sparked by the need to drive data-based decision making throughout the organization and the awareness that they could improve in all facets of their business by working smarter, armed with the data that resulted from our processes. Four years later, the leaders at Bridgestone saw Blended Learning as a way to simultaneously optimize the effectiveness and decrease the cost of training resources.
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Bridgestone Americas, Inc.
Business: Tires
2008 Revenue: $4.7B
Headquarters: Nashville, TN, USA
No. Employees: ~53,000
Began 6S Deployment: 2004
Began Blended Learning: 2008
Market Character: Manufacturing |
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According to Nick Turk, Director of Six Sigma, the primary incentive in moving to Blended Learning was to maximize Master Black Belt coaching time and minimize Master Black Belt burnout from training. While a more exact use of training resources was compelling, what sold management was the reduction in travel costs, Turk added. As of the spring of 2009, Bridgestone has seen a 25% reduction in training hours and a greater than 50% reduction in travel time and cost.
Why would Bridgestone be concerned about the job satisfaction and mental health of their MBBs? Consider just how much work the original training program required of these team members. Internal MBBs wrote the PowerPoint lecture materials and delivered the training at the company headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee. For each class, a team of two Master Black Belts delivered team exercises, and any trainer or trainee not stationed in Nashville had to travel there for classes. Bridgestone required real life projects as a prerequisite of the training, and each candidate gave a project presentation during each of the four weeks of in-class training. These presentations were evaluated by – guess who – the Master Black Belts. Writing, presenting, coaching, evaluating – Bridgestone MBBs did it all.
In the current Blended Learning format, Bridgestone combines the classroom instruction and real project work with e-Learning, classroom simulations, and coaching. With this mix, Bridgestone has reduced Black belt training to two five-day in-class weeks and Green Belt training to two three-day in-class weeks. Topics that used to be presented in live lectures have been converted to e-Learning, so classroom time is dedicated to linking the tools together into a problem solving logic. “We use team simulations such as the live catapult exercise and simulations for transactional process improvement, MSA, and the Define and Measure phases," said Nick Turk.
“We now conduct ‘regional Green Belt’ training, where we directly send Master Black Belts to a location,” explained Turk. “By taking the training to the students and reducing the duration of a class week, we use only one MBB rather than the tag team we employed historically.” MBBs can train more students onsite, and Bridgestone has seen a 60% increase in trained candidates with substantially decreased travel costs, not to mention much happier MBBs.
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