Lean Six Sigma

Many of my friends, Clients and colleagues often ask “what is Lean Six Sigma and what is it used for?” Well to gain an understanding of these important disciplines it’s worthwhile to define them and to review the history of their development. The term “Lean Six Sigma” is a fairly new term and combines two different, but complimentary, continuous improvement practices. Both Lean and Six Sigma are Customer centric disciplines and aim to improve the Customer experience. I like to think of Six Sigma as a method or management system that can be used to improve the product or services being delivered. Six Sigma techniques & tools focus on variation in product or service performance and seek to minimize this variation leading to improved performance, quality and Customer satisfaction. Lean on the other hand, is used to improve the efficiency of the processes that are used in delivering the products or services. Lean techniques & tools focus on the identification and elimination of waste in the delivery process. With a "war on waste" attitude, practitioners seek to improve efficiency, reduce cycle times and lower costs. And customers benefit through reduced lead times, lower costs and improved product quality. If you think about the operating principles behind Lean, they go way back. And if you did the research, you would find that many of the underpinnings go as far back as the 1800’s. Later in the 1920's, Henry Ford was credited with pioneering many of the ideas that made their way into Lean, as we know it today. Other fathers of the movement included Taiichi Ohno, Taguchi Shigeo Shingo, W. Edward Deming, and Joseph Juran. Over the years, Lean concepts matured and were refined by the Japanese through the Toyota Production System (TPS). Within this system, Taiichi Ohno (a major force within TPS) is accredited with the following definition of lean. "All we’re trying to do is shorten the timeline; the time when the customer asks for something to the time we receive the cash." This candidly simple definition is the crux of Lean... A relentless focus on eliminating waste and reducing cycle time through a system or process. Within the Lean movement a paradox exists and it's the notion that an organization can reduce cost while improving Customer satisfaction. Western world paradigms suggest that increasing Customer satisfaction means higher costs. In other words, if I want to improve results or Customer satisfaction, I need to throw money at it. Lean rebuffs this paradigm and argues that when an organization focuses on eliminating waste, resources are freed up to focus on value adding activity, quality improves, cost comes down, and the Customer experience brightens. Now that we've explored the history and definition of Lean, the next Lean Six Sigma blog post will review the Lean “Tool Box”, a collection of 20-25 tools and techniques used by Lean practitioners. In addition, future posts will delve into the specific topic of Six Sigma.

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