"What is Lean Six Sigma?" Many small Business owners ask this very question, so this article will give you an overview on what it is and what the benefits are. Lean Six Sigma is often referred to as Lean Sigma, which is a combination of two business improvement philosophies, namely, Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma.
Lean Manufacturing focuses on waste elimination in the business, and centers activities on questioning all costs associated with producing to customer requirements. In contrast, Six Sigma pursues efficiency improvements by centering its spotlight on process capability and performance in order to optimize the outputs of a process.
Six Sigma uses statistics to understand the blueprint of this process and its performance, and measures this process output over time. Improvements can then be made to reduce the amount of variation from a given process by eliminating those factors which statistically cause variation in the output.
What is Lean Six Sigma? In its essential form, Six Sigma is built around the concept of creating enough process precision so that actual results from that process will only create, on average, 3.4 defects per million opportunities. In other words, if your production line was turning out parts, and you had used Six Sigma to tune and monitor the process, it would only produce 3.4 defects per million parts produced!
Now, imagine that you have "leaned" the same process. You might have have reduced leadtime by 40% through waste elimination.
So, by applying Lean Six Sigma to your production process, you have:
• Increased the speed at which you produce parts by applying Lean principles, and
• created a consistent process outcome, where you would only expect 3.4 defects per million parts produced.
The result – massive gains in profit, and lead time: competitive advantage!
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