Lean Six Sigma

How to Increase Profits By Eliminating Variability, Defects and Waste. The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Learning Lean Six Sigma and It’s Certifications

By Mike Smith

Lean Six Sigma is a methodology that combines two useful tools to help a company achieve more overall profitability by streamlining processes, boosting employee morale, and improving customer relationships in a systematic way.

(Smith 2020, 1)

Six Sigma is a methodology that focuses on improving processes to minimize defects, improve quality, increase profits, and keep customers happy. The methodology is focused on problem-solving. It is data-driven with a specific focus on process variation.

(Smith 2020, 2)

Six Sigma methodology is implemented to evaluate each phase or step of a process and monitor the quality being produced from the process.

(Smith 2020, 3)

Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA)

The PDCA model is designed to make sure that there is an improvement in the overall effectiveness of a process and that there is a noticeable improvement in the quality that the process is producing. This works as follows:

1. Plan: Establish the process in need of improvement in order to align its results with the requirements. Determine what needs to be done in order to align the process with the requirements.

2. Do: Implement the process improvement project.

3. Check: Monitor and measure the progress of the process against acceptable baselines and customers’ needs.

4. Act: Review, align, improve, and report until the final outcome meets the desired outcome.

(Smith 2020, 51)

Standardization in a company ensures that the products they are producing are competitive and with good quality.

Everyone who has worked in a service or manufacturing organization would have heard the saying “Treat the cause and not the symptom.” Root cause analysis is the Lean tool that methodically focuses on finding the root cause of the problem, resolving the issues, and making sure it will not happen again. By completely eliminating the root coot cause and not just applying quick fixes, workarounds, or patches, the problem should not happen again.

(Smith 2020, 53)

Lean Six Sigma is for any organization where waste and variation exist in a customer-centric organization that produces a product or service. Lean Six Sigma works on preventing any defects rather than having to detect defects. It works on the principle that customer satisfaction is the key to increasing the organization’s bottom line. This is achieved by streamlining business processes and keeping those that add value in order to reduce waste, turnover time, and variation.

(Smith 2020, 66)

Lean is the methodology that recognizes where a process needs to be improved upon to eliminate process waste, while Six Sigma targets the variation on the processes.

(Smith 2020, 68)

There are four main things that a customer looks for. These values quadrants are as follows:

– Cost of the product or service

– Quality of the product or service

– Specified features

– Good turnaround time or availability

(Smith 2020, 78)

Any good waiter or manager would wait and watch for the appropriate moment to approach their customers!

(Smith 2020, 80)

An employee that has been given the tools to advance and shine within an organization is more likely to stay with the organization. An employee who feels that their company is not invested in them will leave and take with them their knowledge and skills. This not only leaves a hole in the workforce but also means that a new employee has to be trained all over again.

(Smith 2020, 89)

The goal of Six Sigma is to reduce process variation as much as possible in order to increase process efficiency.

When combined, they can help a business to realize the full potential of their operating processes by improving process efficiency, making the most out of resources, and keeping down costs. This will improve the organization’s bottom line, as continuous improvements are implemented. Understanding both methodologies and how to integrate them greatly improves upon a person’s management skills, which in turn leads to a better working environment for all and satisfied customers.

(Smith 2020, 120)

References

Smith, Mike. 2020. Lean Six Sigma: How To INCREASE PROFITS by Eliminating Variability, Defects and Waste. The Ultimate Beginner’s GUIDE to LEARNING Lean Six Sigma and Its Certifications. N.p.: Independently Published.

ISBN 9781705490440