What is Lean Six Sigma?

Your organization has gone through Six Sigma training and has a Black Belt on staff to guide your organization to improving processes to reduce defects. You’ve administered both applications successfully—the DMAIC (define, analyze, improve and control), and the DMADV (define, measure, analyze, design and verify systems). Yet, you keep hearing something about Lean Six Sigma. What exactly is it? Below we will go through what Lean Six Sigma is and how it can best benefit your organization.

Lean Six Sigma is taking the Six Sigma and integrating it with lean principles to reduce defects, increase speed and quality. In essence, streamlining the core processes. When people think of speed, there is usually has a negative connotation associated with it. However, in this context, it is improving a process, by reducing the cycle time helping to make the process run more smoothly with little or no defects yet increasing the pace in which the process is completed.

When you are implementing Lean Six Sigma into your organization, it is important to remember that together the concept is a balanced process that will help your organization to improve its service quality within a set time limit. One is not better than the other, and together they provide a way in which to make your organization better than it already is or was.

Taking each of these concepts separately, lean principles focuses on speed and flow, while Six Sigma is focused on customer needs and reducing the variation in processes to eliminate defects and rework. While most people are out to prove one better than the other, together the two principles make a logical choice in making for a World Class Organization.

When your organization moves to implement Lean Six Sigma principles, it is important to remember that knowledge creation can sometimes get in the way of improving the flow of creating knowledge. More specifically, project management tendencies can hinder knowledge creation since project management practices are usually forcing choices early on in the process rather than what all of the potential possibilities might be.

For instance, if you determine a solution without exploring all the different possibilities and find out much farther down the road that the solution has a major flaw, there will be a lot of rework. This leads to frustration and costing the project more money than originally budgeted, rather than finding ways in which to reduce defects and produce cost savings.

In essence, if your organization implements Lean Six Sigma, rather than one over the other, you will find that your process improvement efforts will be more efficient, improving quality and speed while reducing your costs and defects.

Read the first post of this series: Introduction to Six Sigma