Lean Six Sigma Success Stories in Water, Energy and Utility Industries

Dominion Resources

Six Sigma at Dominion
Six Sigma is a type of business improvement methodology that Dominion adapted in 2001. Dominion uses Six Sigma as a path to achieving excellence. All four of our business units use it to reduce safety incidents and minimize safety risk to the public, employees and contractors:

• Minimize wait times to speak with an agent and assure phone and internet services are helpful, comprehensive and intuitive
• Reduce the number of power outages and minimize the impacts of those that may occur
• Reduce costs to customers by ensuring accuracy of Company equipment, such as remote meter reads
• Manage maintenance schedules to maintain the reliability and integrity of Dominion’s natural gas pipeline
• Improve generating efficiency and equipment reliability to minimize emissions and hold down electricity costs
• Minimize water and natural resource consumption
• Reduce scheduled nuclear outage time
• Launch the first utility Energy Conservation blog on the Internet, which averages more than 50 visits a day and has a growth rate of 70 percent of new visitors from 108 different countries around the world
• Reduce power consumption by 20 percent at Dominion-owned facilities by replacing various lighting switches, bulbs and fixtures (that’s enough to power over 90 average size homes)
• Recycle over 5,200 wood pallets and 5,300 wood reels that were historically disposed of, every year

JEA, Inc.

Lean Six Sigma and Environment Case Study: JEA
JEA utility has applied Lean and Six Sigma process improvement techniques since 2000:

• Achieved a utility-wide cumulative cost savings of $579 million from Lean and Six Sigma initiatives.
• Avoided an impact of $95 million on the utility’s 2010 budget from projects specifically focused on cost reduction.
• Saved an average of $950 per customer and avoided rate increases of $20 per month directly related to process improvement efforts
• Completed over 580 projects since 2000

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