Lean Six Sigma

Updated June 8, 2023

Learned New From Lean Six Sigma – With many businesses reaching a global spectrum every second in India, there is a great emerging need for efficient process enhancement methodologies that completely satisfy the ever-improving business strategies. The origins of Six Sigma and Lean are very distinctive, and their amalgamation has caused stirs and has improved the face of management and process control.

What is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is mostly associated with quality and quality measurement in organizations. But, it’s not restricted to just the quality aspects of businesses. Six Sigma aims at deploying close-knit processes, which deliver a high level of quality, and it’s through the data- and information-driven approaches and methodologies that Six Sigma earns its name as eradicator and eliminator of defects and misalignment of processes. This yields a high-quality output, which is input to the next department/consumer.

Six Sigma is prevalent at a very grass-root level in the field of consumerism and product development and production. Catering to products and services alike, this standard and advanced model for sheer perfection is extremely customer-centric. A defect in terms of Six Sigma is anything that falls off the realm of customer specifications.

The main objective of the Six Sigma model is to put into practice a measure-based business strategy that aims at continuous process improvement and bring the count of variations between products on the same belt to less than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. This dramatically increases the output capability of business processes as it utilizes the input resourcefully and efficiently, ensuring the customer is the central consumer of the products.

What is Lean?

As put, the word says it all. Lean demonstrates the use of less for more. Lean is that methodology for business strategies that utilize resources and creates a wave of value for customers. The concept of Lean aims at the reduction of waste to a mere minimum or zero. An organization or business adopting Lean manufacturing and Lean production focuses on continuously increasing the value it provides to its customers.

The way it functions goes something like this: waste is eliminated at every stage along the value stream, and this gives us processes that require lesser resources, which include human effort, time, space, capital, and costs, and provides lesser gaps or defects. Products with this approach undergo serious transformations, imbibing quality and value at every stage. It also promotes shorter time-to-market intervals giving customers the deals of the century.

The Lean Six Sigma methodology doesn’t only cater to manufacturing. Its concept is widespread and applies to each process of every kind of business. Its simple yet effective approach allows management to adjust to changes quickly and smoothly conduct the transition. Lean transformations look through 3 business aspects: Purpose, Process, and People. Keeping a keen tab and evaluating these aspects often guide businesses through a successful transition from traditional business systems to lean and skimmed through the model of extensive value creation.

Put them together – Lean Six Sigma!

Now that we know our way through Six Sigma and Lean approaches, we know how beneficial putting the two together would be to use – it’s a sure-shot winning formula. This concept eliminates waste while getting processes to achieve a perfect quality system, providing optimum value to customers.

Lean Six Sigma aims at eliminating the 8 kinds of waste (or Muda): Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Over-production, Over-processing, Defects, and Skills (TIM WOODS).

With the best of both worlds, you are now in the zone of a broader spectrum of tools and methodologies to choose from than singling out the benefits of Lean to the benefits obtained from Six Sigma. The Lean Six Sigma paradigm offers you a more efficient and greater chance and countering issues with the business strategy and processes. It enables you to tackle the problems of waste and defects in a more concise, precise, and scalable manner.

Lean Six Sigma, simply put, takes the Lean approach of getting rid of unnecessary processes or resources that don’t add value to the end product of that stage and combines it with Six Sigma’s ideology of systematically zeroing on to and eliminating the defects within a particular process; all this with the main component of a collaborative team effort.

The Effects of Lean Six Sigma on Your Business

Lean Six Sigma tools & techniques aim at providing quality, efficiency, and agile factors to your ongoing business to get your ROI and revenue skyrocketing as per your business strategy. Here are a few important effects or pillars of results that come from a Lean Six Sigma tools implementation:

• Customer Satisfaction: This doesn’t result in customer satisfaction but in customer satisfaction optimization. Since the focus is directly on the customer’s needs, this comes as a priority, thus, assuring the customer of the quality and value of your product or service.
• Raising the Bar: You can give your business that competitive edge over others with a precise implementation of this powerful tool for business management.
• Teamwork and Collaboration: You will find stakeholders from every business stratum participating in the streamlining process, especially the top management. This will increase the stakes and make the company goal bolder and more prominent.

The 6 Lessons I Learned from Lean Six Sigma

Now since you’re all brushed up upon the topic of Lean, Six Sigma, and Lean Six Sigma, here’s a take on the best 6 lessons that Lean Six Sigma has taught me over my tenure as a project manager.

#1: DMAIC (“duh-may-ik”) – Five Phases of Solving a Problem

Define – Defining the problem is of utmost importance and is the singular most essential step. In this phase, it’s mostly the project leaders that scale out a high-level view of the process and gather data to understand the customer demands and needs with regard to the process.

Measure – Measuring the extent of the problem allows you to tap its core and prepare a complete data collection plan. Here you can determine the start and end of your project.

Analyze – During this phase, the data collected and the process are thoroughly reviewed and analyzed to get a holistic view of the root causes that promote waste and defects.

Improve – Here, the team starts to develop innovative and creative solutions that kick-start the improvement of the said process to the levels of Six Sigma and Lean.

Control – Improvement, once implemented, needs to be sustained and continuously monitored for longevity. This phase also includes a planned reiteration of the steps for Lean Six Sigma and detailed documentation of the entire process that leads to waste and defect reduction.

#2: Lean Six Sigma as a Culture

The Lean Six Sigma principles dictate the process not as a set of rules but as a way of working. Inculcating these principles will affect how a business functions as a unit, thus, giving it ample time and space to narrow down the problem points and improve on them, whether in a particular lean six sigma project management or any change initiative.

The way to make it culture is to have them practiced at every stage in every segment of the organization, exposing the benefits of lean six sigma and its advantages. This culture would be sophisticated and well-balanced and would always tip the organization to acquire the quality of the highest level.

Integrating the systems of Lean Six Sigma with the current business systems involves a lot of preparation and lean six sigma training to employees, which needs to be done on a company-wide scale. Results are the focal point of any methodology at the organizational level. With this in mind, one should conduct these integrations with the inside-out and outside-in approaches.

#3: The Almighty 3 Ps

Policy – Process – Procedure: These three Ps are governing factors of Lean Six Sigma that exert control and continuous improvement at every value stream. With the systems built around this concept and approach, there also needs to be a proper documentation and adherence system to get the most out of the system.

• Policy – Policies are the guidelines for the effective use of process improvements, set by the principles of Lean Six Sigma to ensure efficiency in resource utilization and business strategy.
• Process – A close look at the process is the only way to tap into the benefits of Lean Six Sigma successfully. Each process is important, and cutting out the waste on each of them will yield great results.
• Procedure – The procedure is normally well-documented to ensure the implementation is correctly pursued and conducted. It’s a step-by-step commentary on the process implementation.

#4: Data! Data! Data!

Data comes as the central character within business improvement tools and methodologies. Without data, you will be simply shooting aimlessly in the sky. Once you’ve collected the right amount of correct data, brainstorming, analysis, and implementation, become easier for the team and the company as a whole. You will be able to:

• Pin-point pain areas – You will know if your problem is, in fact, process flaws or behavioral depending on the data collected.
• Decide effectively – With data properly jotted down and mapped, decision-making comes easily to different stakeholders at different hierarchical positions.
• Get down to the details – Data should be collected accurately and from all business strata. It won’t be valuable if it’s not holistic.
• Know the current status/scenario – Only if you know your current standing will you know how far you are from improvement and determine the level of improvement needed.
• Understand the road ahead – Once the data and information are mapped, you can scale out a plan to the end goal.
• Analyze using accurate facts and figures – You can go right through the decimal points with accurate data, which can be valuable to different industries, such as the healthcare industry.
• Reach the root cause – The more data, the better the analysis, and the faster do you reach the cause of the problems, thus, finding ways to eliminate them.

#5: Elimination of non-value streams

Both Lean and Six Sigma advocate the utilization of process to the T and eliminate the process of wasting and the concept of defects within a product or service. This is a serious concern. A simple jotting down or WBS activity can aid in reviewing all the processes from the start of the cycle to its end, giving you an overview of the business structure. Post-review, you need to make sure that you eliminate unnecessary or non-valuable tasks within the structure. This step is essential to cutting down and prioritizing your tasks towards a project or company goal.

One should initiate this step as early as possible. It should be targeted at becoming a win-win situation for both the company and the employees. Thus, promoting the Lean Six Sigma culture within the organization.

“More with Less” is the catchphrase here, which enables companies to invest in less, but the efficiency of the processes can yield more than what would have been without the implementation. And, while you know what ‘more’ would mean, I would describe it as substantial.

#6: Specificity is Key

Being specific in your goals and objectives makes the process of results extraction simpler and much more meaningful. If you want to achieve a particular target, your goal statement should resonate with the exact details of the goal to be attained. You can’t mention that “next year the company needs to break even of the newly launched product and spread that profit consistently over the coming 5 years” it needs to have details like the facts and figures of where we are and what exactly would be the forecast for the coming 5 years once the break-even takes place.

Quantifying goals is a fundamental aspect of running businesses and sustaining them. Lean Six Sigma taught me the importance of this fundamental aspect and its repercussions if not looked after carefully. Identifying quick wins or small-term milestones within the company’s greater goals and attaching figures to these goals can turn the tables around for the business and prove to be a success metric for the implemented Lean Six Sigma approach.

Though these lessons sound idealistic, aiming for them has its own fruits once the canon shifts to its correct position. Halt! Fire round!

Let us know what you think about this short 101 class on Lean Six Sigma in the comments section below, and do let us know what else you learned while implementing this awesome tool into your business strategy.