What is Lean Six Sigma?
Lean Enterprise originated from the Toyota Production System and has been implemented in many industries since. Lean aims to rid processes of waste, speeding them up and making them more flexible and responsive, thereby responding to customer orders for goods and services more quickly.
More about Lean >>Six Sigma originated as a quality programme in Motorola and aims to reduce variation in processes thereby reducing defects and errors and improving customer satisfaction. To optimise the performance of any process requires a Lean and Six Sigma approach to achieve fast, responsive, correct and consistent outcomes.
Six Sigma also introduced the Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control (DMAIC) methodology to sustainable improvement in processes. This brings a rigorous fact based approach to problem solving projects.
Many organisations including GE, AlliedSignal, have published impressive results from deploying Lean and Six Sigma saving costs, increasing customer satisfaction and improving revenues. The results that these large corporations have reported amount to an average of £150,000 per Black Belt project and average annual cost savings of 1 – 2% of sales.
The key roles in the Deployment of Six Sigma are
- Leadership/Champion
- Green Belt
- Black Belt