What Comes After the Low Hanging Fruit? Making smart choices about lean Six Sigma applications There are four major approaches for organisation wide improvement efforts that fall under the label “lean Six Sigma,” as evidenced by current practices at many industrial organisations, service organisations and consulting firms: Traditional Six Sigma (TSS) Lean Six Sigma plus (LSS+) Lean Six Sigma light (LSSL) Traditional lean (TL) Each has its own strengths, but how do you determine which deploy... Read Full Story

How to Identify and Select Lean Six Sigma Projects Lean Six Sigma is a powerful method for improving existing products, processes and services. Six Sigma was developed by Motorola in 1987. Motorola’s Six Sigma yielded significant financial results and became popular with many other companies, even though Six Sigma was practiced without the benefit of the define, measure, analyze, improve and control (DMAIC) strategy, Black Belts (BBs), or a defined project selection process. In the mid-... Read Full Story

How to identify and select a Six Sigma project. There is usually no shortage of projects to work on in an organisation, in fact there are nearly always too many. However these can be conflicting in both objectives and resources used to carry out these projects. For example a sales department may be under pressure to convert more business through its sales pipeline, whereas the operations department is struggling to cope with the variety of work. The two departments are not strategically align... Read Full Story

Experience has shown that obtaining organisational support for a Six Sigma project is one of the major success factors, and anyone attempting to undertake a project without the necessary support will find it a very difficult and unpleasant task. So what we can we do to ensure we get the support we need? The tool set we use to obtain support in Six Sigma is called ‘Stakeholder Analysis’, and it consists of five simple steps: ? Identify project stakeholders (individuals or groups) Define the cu... Read Full Story

How do we actually make this Lean Six Sigma thing work for us? Once you’ve made the decision to deploy Lean Six Sigma you then need to plan the deployment to make sure it succeeds.  A deployment is a big undertaking for an organisation and usually involves significant investment of energy, commitment and funding, and so you need to make sure every aspect  is covered, every eventually foreseen.  Many companies have been through the deployment scenario – and some have got the scars to show for ... Read Full Story

Selecting Six Sigma Projects? Focusing effort and resources to deliver maximum benefits to the organisation Choosing the right six sigma projects is key to the success of an organization in terms of delivery of business objectives, business plan strategies and development opportunities for the workforce. However, there is a cost associated to running six sigma projects that isn’t always captured or even considered when an organization embarks on six sigma. Choosing the right projects is cruci... Read Full Story

Using Change Management Process to achieve sustainable benefits in a Lean Six Sigma deployment Many companies struggle to get good traction with their Lean Six Sigma deployments. They spend time training Six Sigma Green Belts and Six Sigma Black Belts and launch an initial set of projects only to find that very few of the projects actually get completed, and that even fewer are able to create truly sustainable benefits. Why is this and how can it be prevented? The main reason for these issues... Read Full Story

How will it benefit me and my company? Despite Lean Six Sigma being around for over twenty years now, it is remarkable that a significant number of companies and individuals still don’t really know what it is. Oh, they’ve heard of it, and may even have been involved in it, but when it comes to defining it or reaping the huge benefits it can offer, then far too many are still in the dark. A few of the frequently asked questions from students and companies regarding Lean Six Sigma and how to us... Read Full Story

How Customers demand improvement and people within organizations deliver that improvement through Lean Six Sigma. Influencing people or organizations through the use of Lean Six Sigma employs different tools and techniques depending upon the organization, it’s continuous improvement maturity, and it’s appetite for change. We’ll explore different ways of using some of the key techniques in the Lean Six Sigma Toolkit to both communicate the need for change and demonstrate change within an org... Read Full Story

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a common tool used by Lean Practitioners to identify waste within a value stream. It is usually carried out in two stages: Current state – the ‘as is’ map of the process Future state – the vision for the future including all the Lean Improvements A value stream map contains all flows of information and materials utilised within an enterprise from raw material right through to the customer. It typically contains: Information management e.g. Order processing, pur... Read Full Story