Green Belt and Black Belt Certifications – Allen Industries

Author: Tommy Allen

After being involved in 3P and 5S Kaizen events, Lean quickly became integrated into my daily work thought process. I wanted to be able to teach these initiatives to co-workers to empower them to take action into their own hands. Allen Industries is just like any other company, our employees are the livelihood. All of the past success is because of the intelligence and willpower the employees have towards the company to get it as far as it is today. So the real question that I asked myself, why not give the employees the tools to better the work environment?

I began my Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification with the Guthrie Group about a year ago. During this time I took several classes which gave me all of the basic tools to understand the fundamental foundation of Lean Six Sigma. Classes are set up not only to just teach, but have you interact with the process in order to understand clearly. Almost every principle is followed up with a hands-on activity to give you an actual real life application. Something as simple as putting together a remote control car taught me more about Muda than I ever understood by going through actual Lean events. By going through this training, it made me see the waste not only on the shop floor but on my desk, in my car, in my apartment. I have always heard that an employee is blind to their own process until they are taught to take themselves out of it, because you can never see the wasteful tendencies you perform every single day. The reason is because you have never questioned your actions before so it has become your “daily routine.” This training taught me take a different approach to how I work and how I should convince others to work. Waste is everywhere; it’s a Green Belt’s job to help identify that waste and eliminate it.

Tommy Allen receives Green Belt Certification

My Six Sigma Black Belt certification was much different. Ever since Allen Industries began Lean events two years ago, I had always been a huge advocate for removing waste. So it interested me to learn the Six Sigma approach, which opened up a whole new world. By reducing variation, Six Sigma is a much more methodical approach to problems.  Everything can be measured with data. This class was the vital tool that allowed interpreting and dissecting this data in so many ways. Even though there was a great deal of content, the class went at a perfect pace. In every module, there were real world examples along the way that would reinforce the content to stick in your brain. It’s a tool that everyone should get certified on in my opinion. It will be able to save money and improve output in no time. This involved several weeks of classes in which we progressed along the trail of Six Sigma projects. And along the way we were tasked to perform our own project with very helpful one-on-one session. Being a Six Sigma Black Belt means so many things. To me it was very important to be able to teach these philosophies to other personnel within my company. Being able to show them how any process can improve and give them encouragement in their job. I’m not only a much better employee, but I feel personally invested in my work which I hope I will rub off onto some of my colleagues.