What Is Lean Six Sigma

An introduction to Lean Six Sigma

What is Lean

The main objective of lean is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. In other words, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.

What is Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a management framework that has evolved from a focus on process improvement using statistical tools to a comprehensive framework for managing a business. The results that world-class companies such as General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Honeywell, Motorola, and many others have accomplished speak for themselves. Six Sigma has become a synonym for improving quality, reducing cost, improving customer loyalty, and achieving bottom-line results.

In its fullest form, Six Sigma is a world-class management system for driving, achieving, and sustaining breakthrough improvements in every part of an organization. Through structured planning, installation of a deployment infrastructure, and systematic DMAIC project implementation, an organization leverages Six Sigma to achieve its most important business objectives.

Essentially, Six Sigma is about improving processes, or the way work gets done in an organization. If you operate your processes at Six Sigma quality, then you commit no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities for defects. This means you have to operate your processes correctly the first time 99.9997 percent of the time.

In its totality, Six Sigma is a vision, a philosophy, a management system, a scientific methodology, and a performance-improvement tool box.

What is Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma is the combination of two world-class approaches to organizational performance improvement Lean and Six Sigma.

The basic idea behind Lean Six Sigma is to blend the two root methodologies into one approach that optimizes the quality, speed, and the cost of doing business.

Really, the connected goals of better, faster, and cheaper all exist to overcome some shortfall preventing optimum operation, like any shortfall that exists in the human body. Everyone has some areas of compromised functioning in their bodies some part of the spine, some aspect of the organs, some system that is not functioning optimally.

Don't pigeonhole Lean or Six Sigma. Be careful not to say Lean as good for one thing like waste removal and cycle time reduction, and Six Sigma as good for another like defect and cost reduction. Doing this will take your mind off of thinking.

Organizations are no different, as they do not function in an optimal manner. In fact, organizations tend to get more complex, disorganized, and inefficient over time. The only reason they do not get more efficient over time, is because those who run them are constantly improving what they do and how they do it.

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