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Lean Six Sigma : Combining Six Sigma Quality with Lean Production Speed Michael L. George
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Lean is a discipline in which the goal is to eliminate waste and increase process efficiency through a focus on improvements in speed and cost. While lean techniques focus on speed and increasing the amount of work completed in a process or value stream, Six Sigma focuses on improving the quality of each process to achieve a better result. Lean Six Sigma developed when practitioners trained in both methodologies began to recognize the potential of combining them. Lean Six Sigma is a natural evolution of the quality and process improvement disciplines that originated in the 1950s to improve manufacturing. Lean Six Sigma which is primarily designed for services refers to a method which works in improving the performance of a business by maximizing shareholder value and then achieving the quickest improvement rate in quality, capital, speed of processes, cost and customer satisfaction. There are a lot of reasons why the principles of lean and Six Sigma are combined when it comes to improving the services of a business organization. Lean Six Sigma actually combines two great philosophies: Toyota's lean manufacturing process philosophy and Motorola's Six Sigma management philosophy. As the story goes, a senior executive named Art Sundry took a pragmatic look at Motorola's poor product quality in the 1970's and he began to share his notions that there were connections between increases in quality and decreases in costs of production. By learning about “Lean” or “Six Sigma” one can begin to understand the big picture business perspective in a pinch, as these concepts promise to intensify proficiencies toward becoming a top notch analyst. It combines the time-focused strategy inherent in Lean with the analytical tools of Six Sigma, which allows for a flexible solution set to address the broadest set of problems. The “related” methods also reviewed in the article are the Theory of constraints (TOC), Agile manufacturing, Business process reengineering (BPR). Thank you for sharing some of your thoughts and perceptions regarding my working paper entitled “Towards an Integration of the Lean Enterprise System, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma and Related Enterprise Process Improvement Methods” (August 10, 2010; MIT ESD-2010-05).