Lean Six Sigma Principles

31-Mar-2020

A collaborative effort is required to achieve a task; a team works together to accomplish goals and this is where Lean Six Sigma comes into effect. Lean Six Sigma is a method that counts on the synergetic efforts by teams to ameliorate performance by consistently eradicating routine waste and disparities.

It not only helps with the waste reduction but provides a structure and scheme for head to toe organizational culture change. 

An Overview 

Lean is about accomplishing things swiftly. Lean Six Sigma is an approach that aims towards the refinement of the flow in the value stream along with the elimination of waste.

Lean Six Sigma makes use of the substantial DMAIC framework and statistical tools and concepts to get to the pivotal causes to contemplate and lessen discrepancy.

The whole lean concept is about doing things without a trace of a defect.

A conglomeration of both the tools (lean and Six Sigma) allows for an arching improvement paradigm that consolidates powerful data-driven tools to resolve problems and difficulties in order to ensure smooth and rapid transitional augmentations at negligible costs.

The best combination of both the tools is made in which lean approaches add value to the system and Six sigma works towards defect and variation reduction in order to achieve desired results for an organization.

All over the globe, many organizations from varied industries are adopting a lean six sigma strategy. The list especially pertains to the organizations that previously followed the six sigma approach. To get a transitional push and to eliminate the costs, the same organizations are now diverging towards the lean six sigma concept and approach. 

Introduction To Lean

The Lean principles were first developed by Toyota to run its Toyota production system. Lean and six sigma concepts were then built to ensure and process quality. It is a highly arbitrary approach that caters and focuses on the quality system.

The lean system utilizes stream mapping procedures to particularly focus on quality, cost, and delivery.

Lean is a strategic tool for transition and refinement. It not only focuses on the tools at the functioning level to eliminate costs but also adds value to the whole process. The strategy is simple to comprehend, it basically advocates learning at each step and implementing that learning in order to reduce defects and determining the value of a given process by discerning between the value-added process from the non-value-added one. This, in turn, reduces waste to ultimately achieve value for the process. The strategy thus becomes, focus on the work, learn from it and improvise it to achieve desired results from the process.

Introduction To Six Sigma 

The Six Sigma process was first developed at Motorola somewhere around the 1980s to eliminate defects in its processes. Its main goal was to achieve the desired performance rate to put up a defect-free environment in its organization.

Lean and six sigma are process-based enhancement methodologies that were developed in the manufacturing environments. These methodologies are proven effective and point to several success stories that prove their efficiency in the manufacturing environment.

Advantages Of Lean and Six Sigma

Integrating lean and six sigma concepts and theories create a win-win situation for the organizations. The strategies of lean Six sigma provide methods to refine the flows and eradicate wastes in order to make the process smooth and reliable and effective as well. Value-adding opportunities are rapidly created and identified to ensure continuous improvement throughout the system. This leads to greater productivity and the chances of waste generation are lessen to two-fold.

It calibrates the financial benefits and savings. This, in turn, offers chances of focusing efforts on the areas where improvements and improvisations are much needed hence creating a virtual zero defect system. The increased scope for improvement benefits the organization to the fullest, thus leading to better products for the organization as well as for the industry.

A conglomeration of both (lean and Six Sigma) methodologies will result in the development and utilization of tools and practices that come handy to resolve issues and problems that may arise in an organization and could create swift transitional enhancements at negligible costs. In addition to this, it would also generate potential productivity, enhanced quality, cost reduction, improved speed, a guarded environment for employers and exceeding customer expectations.

Lean and Six Sigma are customer focusing methodologies that strive to improve the ongoing processes in the organizational setup in order to achieve a defect-free environment to create efficient services for the consumers. The combination of Lean and Six Sigma increases the performance level to match the expectations of the consumers for the betterment of the organization. Furthermore, this leads to unity among the workspaces which in turn creates a collaborative effort to ensure the proper and smooth working of the teams involved in the ownership of processes. The system gets in constant regulation and the improvement comes under the pivotal focus to reduce and eliminate all the defects that may cause the loss of finances in order to cope up with the deficiencies.

Lean and Six Sigma concepts allow projects to complete on time and as desired because there is the utilization of not only the statistics but a lot of varied historical, perspective and data experiences are involved to generate and make fruitful decisions which can produce desired results and can help in the profit maximization for an organization working together in different industries.

The lean concepts also allow us to comprehend the sources of variations which in turn helps with the error detection and the eradication process. When coupled with the Six Sigma theories it tends to produce better results that can improve the ongoing processes in an organization, leading to the actual overall development of the different processes indicated in the work system. The whole idea of this conglomeration is to provide efficient substitutes and resolution whenever encountered with an error or defect while in the process of generating consumable products for the customers. The cost is kept in the focus and the question of development is pondered over this segment this in turn allows the organization to develop efficient strategies to tackle the spontaneity of the situation.

An Outlook of the Lean Six Sigma Principles

Lean Six Sigma is a robust and proven method that bears desirable results. The principles pertaining to the Six Sigma are listed below :

• The consumer is the main focus. The entire system should focus on the customer in order to generate profitable systems. Well, if you can keep your audience happy, you can achieve wonders for your organization.
• Moving on to next, identifying and understanding the value stream is of utmost importance as far as Lean Six Sigma principles are concerned. It is very necessary to identify and comprehend the processes involved in the work system and how one can utilize it to create fruit-bearing results.
• Govern, enhance and smooth out the process of Flow in an organization thereby adding to the efficiency.
• One of the crucial Lean Six Sigma principles is the removal of non-value-added processes and waste. This creates a truly working environment wherein defects are eradicated to ensure proper workflow.
• Creation of a reliable system to undertake improvement and enhancement options.

Education Professional