How Are Lean and Six Sigma Similar?
| by Chris Anderson | ||||
I think of Lean and Six Sigma as having many similarities and differences. If you see waste happening, you can eliminate it. A lean visual factory helps us to remove obvious waste. Takt times help us to balance lines, while standard work, total preventive maintenance, and 5S help us reduce variation.
Lean is more than a set of tools, however: it’s about culture, the work environment, and a way of thinking. Lean works well at the beginning of any quality program, where you want to sensitize the company to waste and teach continual improvement. Lean is fast, agile, and prepares people for change.
If you are blessed with a high transaction environment and can easily recognize defect data and trends, you can eliminate the defects. Statistical process control helps us to remove obvious control limit violations, detect instability, and monitor process drift. DMAIC, DOE, and DFSS help us to filter out noise and methodically remove less obvious waste.
Six Sigma presents a different way of looking at issues and can help your employees get over intractable problems. Six Sigma works well in the middle of any quality program, where you want to move the company to higher (i.e., world-class) levels of performance. Six Sigma is sophisticated, technical, and removes performance obstacles.
Both Lean and Six Sigma require discipline, time, and a subject matter expert to deploy and manage. Neither requires a lot of money relative to the cost of poor quality they reduce. Each can eliminate obvious waste and reduce variation, though what is considered obvious or a variation may differ in each program.
Lean and Six Sigma by themselves can play a valuable role in any continuous improvement program, but it’s when they’re used in combination that companies will see the biggest, longest lasting payoffs.
Categories:
Lean Six Sigma Quality
Tags:
continuous improvement • cost of quality • DFSS • DMAIC • lean six sigma • lean thinking • quality program • statistical process control
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Originally published in 2010 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title How Are Lean and Six Sigma Similar?. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com
One Response to “How Are Lean and Six Sigma Similar?”
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July 13th, 2010 at 9:53 am
Colin, while we don’t have a “Project Management policies and procedures” manual, we have a number of procedures dealing with project management, specific to certain areas of the company (e.g., Sales and Marketing, Finance). What kind of project do you have in mind?