LEAN SIX SIGMA

 
Lean Six Sigma combines the two most valuable methodologies focusing on performance improvement which are Six Sigma and Lean principles. Six Sigma is a tool leading people to make work better, and Lean concepts teach workers to work faster.

Six Sigma is a business management strategy, originally developed by Motorola that today enjoys wide-spread application in many sectors of industry.

Six Sigma seeks to identify and remove the causes of defects and errors in manufacturing and/or service delivery and business processes. It uses a set of management methods, including statistical methods, and creates a dedicated infrastructure of people within the organization who are experts in these methods.

Six Sigma aims to deliver “Breakthrough Performance Improvement” from current levels) in business and customer relevant operational and performance measures.

Business or operational measures are elements like:

• Customer Satisfaction Rating Score

• Time taken to respond to customer queries or complaints

• % Defect rate in Manufacturing

• Cost of executing a business process transaction

• Yield (Productivity) of service operations or production

• Inventory turns (or) Days of Inventory carried

• Billing and Cash Collection lead time

• Equipment Efficiency (Downtime, time taken to fix etc.,)

• Accident / Incident rate

• Time taken to recruit personnel and so on…

Six Sigma initiatives are planned and implemented in organizations on “Project by Project” basis. Each project aims not only to improve a chosen performance metric but also sustain the improvement achieved.

Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has quantified financial targets (revenue increase, cost reduction or profit increase)

How is Six Sigma different?

Features that differentiate Six Sigma apart from previous quality

improvement initiatives include :

• A clear focus on achieving measurable and quantifiable financial

returns from any Six Sigma project.

• An increased emphasis on strong and passionate management leadership and support.

• A special organization infrastructure of "Champions," "Master Black Belts," "Black Belts”, “Green Belts” etc. to lead and implement the Six Sigma approach.

• A clear commitment to making decisions on the basis of verifiable data, rather than assumptions and guesswork.

• The term "Six Sigma" is derived from a field of statistics known as process capability study. It refers to the ability of processes to produce a very high proportion of output within specification. Processes that operate with "Six sigma quality" over the short term are assumed to produce (long-term) defect levels below 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO).Six Sigma's implicit goal is to improve all processes to that level of quality or better.

In recent years, Six Sigma has sometimes been combined with lean manufacturing (management) to yield a methodology named Lean Six Sigma.

Lean is a philosophy and set of management techniques focused on continuous “eliminating waste” so that every process, task or work

action is made “value adding” (the real output customer pays for!!) as viewed from customer perspective. Lean “waste elimination” targets

the “Eight Wastes” namely:

• Overproduction – Making more than what is needed by customer / market demand

• Over-processing - Doing more to a product/service (but not perceived as

value by customer)

• Waiting – For material, information, people, equipment, procedures, approvals and more

• Transportation – Movement of products / items during or after production

• Defects – Errors, mistakes, non-complying products, services, documents, transactions

• Rework and Scrap – Products, transactions or outputs not meeting specifications and have to be fixed, redone, rectified, marked down or scrapped / unusable.

• Motion – Mainly people, document movement, searching etc.

• Inventory – Buffer stocks or resources (Raw, Work in process, FG, Bench staff etc.,)

• Unused Creativity – People knowledge and skills that are not utilized by the company.

Wastes make the organization slow, inefficient and uncompetitive. Lean methods help to remove / reduce waste and contributes to driving “business agility” (velocity) through smooth work flow across the organization resulting in rapid fulfillment of customer needs in an

optimum manner.

Why Lean and Six Sigma Integrate?

We knew we wanted to have Six Sigma Tools, that was clear.

But we also decided that what really makes change in a factory

are some of the Lean tools.

Putting in a pull system, reducing batch sizes, significantly changing setup times, all of a sudden everything starts to flow.

Those are the types of things we saw over time that really made a difference in our factories .

Six Sigma with Lean Is the Integration of Two Powerful Business Improvement Approaches

Six Sigma (Precision + Accuracy +VOC )	Lean (Speed + Low Cost +Flexibility )
• Voice of the Customer (VOC) • Statistical Process Control • Design of Experiment • Error-proofing • Measurement Systems Analysis • Failure Modes Effect Analysis • Cause and Effect Analysis • Hypothesis Testing	• Value stream mapping • Bottleneck identification and removal • “Pull” from the Customer • Setup and queue reduction • Process flow improvement • Kaizen • Supply Chain Strategy • 5S • S&OP

Integrating Lean and Six Sigma Initiatives

Lean and Six Sigma can co-exist independently, but the benefits of integration are tremendous...

• Single channel for employing limited resources

• One improvement strategy for the organization

• Highly productive and profitable synergy …while the pitfalls of not integrating them are formidable.

• Divided focus of the organization

• Separate and unequal messages for improvement

• Destructive competition for resources and projects

• Six Sigma is the “Unifying Framework”

• Six Sigma provides the improvement infrastructure

        • CEO Engagement

        • Deployment Champions

        • Green Belts, Black Belts, Master Black Belts

• Over-riding methodology: DMAIC, DMEDI, DMADV

• Lean provides additional tools and approaches to “turbo-charge” improvement efforts

           • Tools: Set-up reduction, 5S, Kanban, Waste Reduction

           • Approaches: Kaizen, Mistake