Introducing Lean Six Sigma to your Organisation

Business over the past 10 years have tried, tested or adopted Six Sigma for one specific reason; the financial gain generated by Six Sigma impacts the bottom line.

Successful organisations such as; GE, Caterpillar and Alcan have all utilised Six Sigma to narrow the gap between the shareholders expectations and the results. They have made the Six Sigma tool and methodology of continuous improvement central to their businesses. Six Sigma begins with a vision, followed by strategy development and finally ends with execution.

The alignment and unification of strategy and execution to deliver results have successfully led to the development and empowerment of human capital, bringing it towards high performance of continuous improvement in the entire Six Sigma organisation.

The experiences of GE, Caterpillar and Alcan have made Six Sigma the favourite methodology of business leaders today. It provides the unifying language and foundation that establishes business goals and brings cultural empowerment. This therefore creates focus towards maximising value to the business and shareholders alike.

So, what is Lean Six Sigma? Lean was first introduced as a production methodology that focuses on a business’s internal need to maximise value added activities and the reduction of waste that increases the cost of running a business. It was first popularised by the Toyota production systems. Lean focuses on 3 main things;

Increasing process speed through the elimination of complexities
Utilising tools that analyse process flows, constraints and time delays at each step of the process
Identifying value added and value enabling activities through the elimination of non-value added activities known as waste

The modern lean production also focuses on improving the process flow by addressing the imbalance and creating a production level that acts as a pulling process.

Six Sigma itself normally finds its way into an organisation as a quality improvement method due to its large reputation of using statistical tools to measure quality and precision of a product or service. Since its birth in the early 80s, Six Sigma has evolved from being simply a statistical quality improvement technique into an established methodology that provides businesses with a comprehensive toolset to improve the capability of business processes and quality of products and services. Six Sigma emphasises the need for improvement in business performance that leads to minimising effects for example; not meeting a customer’s specification of specific service requirement. Further to this Six Sigma also addresses variation in process and in quality that deters the capability of consistently producing high quality products or services.

The terminologies that come along with Six Sigma are;

The DMAIC Cycle; Meaning Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control which is a problem solving roadmap
The Measure of DPMO; This is defects per million opportunities. As Six Sigma is based on quality it also measures the process of performance and quality based on non-conformance to a quality specification
The VOC; This is the Voice of Customer which is a method utilised to determine a customers need and wants that is organised and structured with key measures and metrics in order to establish and evaluate quality standards.

The combination of Lean and Six Sigma is the new Six Sigma generation. This methodology is the offspring of two very essential components of business process improvement that compliment and reinforce one another. Lean aims to create value through the elimination of waste and non-value added activities, whilst Six Sigma on the other hand measures the quality and looks at meeting the customer’s needs. Lean on its own cannot bring a process under statistical control to achieve quality targets, whilst Six Sigma alone cannot significantly improve process speed or reduce waste in order to improve on capital. Lean and Six Sigma separately enable two characteristic voices that are vital for business success;

The voice of the customer which facilitates the characteristic and measure of quality through Six Sigma
The voice of the business that allows the characteristic of speed through Lean processes and operations

In the combination of both, a third fusion voice is also created (one that is often overlooked); the voice of the employee. VOE represents investment of people and human capital empowerment.

Reducing waste, improving efficiency and empowering employees are all targets high on the lists of many managers. Our Lean Six Sigma Training Courses are a perfect way to learn exactly how to achieve these goals and become Lean Six Sigma Accredited at the same time. There's a great value course running near you soon!