KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany -- The awards are starting to pile up for the 21st Theater Sustainment Command ORSA team.
The Operations Research System Analysis team won a pair of awards from the Lean Six Sigma Excellence Awards Program for Fiscal Year 2016. The ORSA team accepted the Process Improvement Deployment Excellence Award (PIDEA) for the Subordinate Organization Level -- which recognized the program as a whole.
The team also accepted the Process Improvement Program Team Excellence Award (PIPTEA) for the non-Enterprise Black-Belt Level category -- which recognized the team for its project to improve personnel tempo reporting within the 21st TSC personnel.
The awards were presented May 18 during a ceremony in the Joint Staff Flag Room, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
This marks the seventh-consecutive year that the 21st TSC ORSA team has been recognized for its LSS program, having won a PIDEA in six of the last seven years. The team has also either led or mentored a project which won a PIPTEA award at either a green or black-belt level each year since 2010.
The ORSA team overseas the 21st TSC's Lean Six Sigma program. The goal of Lean is to reduce waste and Six Sigma is to improve process quality. Green belt projects are typically associated with Lean and making a process faster. Black belt projects are more complex. Green belt projects are projects requiring a more sophisticated process quality-improvement tools.
The awards are piling up for the 21st TSC ORSA team so much - in fact - that the team is disqualified from winning further awards for the overall program per program regulations. But that doesn't bother Lt. Col. Jeremy Boardman, head of the 21st TSC ORSA program.
"We've definitely done well over the last several years," he said. "We've consistently managed a strong program, but winning awards is not ultimately what we strive for. We strive for adding value to the organization. Awards are important, they enhance the credibility of the program and reward exceptional belts, but they are not the end-all-be-all."
The team won the PIPTEA award for its project in improving accuracy in Personnel Tempo reporting. The Lean Six Sigma Awards Program cited this project as improving the efficiency and accuracy of PERSTEMPO reporting and saving the 21st TSC an estimated $703,000.
The 21st TSC ORSA program - as a whole - won the PIPDEA award for all of its projects combined, resulting in a net financial benefit of $2.9 million.
"The work our LSS team has done these past two years to nest their work with mine and my subordinate commander's priorities has set our program apart," Maj. Gen. Duane Gamble, 21st TSC Commander said. "It has earned our LSS team this recognition. Their development of our PERSTAT tool knowledge management tool not only enables us to meet our regulatory responsibilities but also helps us fulfill our leadership obligations to our Soldiers. Our LSS team is exceptional."
The program has been effective in recent years by tailoring its projects to fit the commander's priorities and by engaging at the battalion level to create solutions that persist even after personnel rotate in and out of the command.
"We've been running our Innovation Program since October 2015," Boardman said. "We see the battalion level as the best place to engage. That's the sweet spot. At higher echelons, problem complexity increases significantly, which can quickly overwhelm the capacity of our small office."
The ORSA team hosts two-week Lean Six Sigma classes. The next green belt courses start Aug. 21 and Sept. 18. The next black belt courses will be held in October and November with exact dates to be determined.
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