What The Heck Is Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma is sort of a misnomer. It’s a coined term, but it’s actually two entirely different things that compliment each other- Lean and Six Sigma. Allow me to explain in the most simple way I can.

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Lean

Lean is the methodology used to reduce “excess fat” in a process, and in essence make it leaner, more fit, and efficient.

This is where you identify what steps in a process are (1) Value-Adding to your customers, (2) Value-Enabling, or (3) Non-Value Adding – essentially the wastes in a process.

To make a process Lean is to break the process apart and eliminate the steps that are considered wastes, then re-engineer the process in such a way that it will be more streamlined and efficient when you put it back together.

For example, if you have a pizza business, and you would want to improve your delivery time from an average of 45 minutes down to 30 minutes, what should you do? Applying Lean, you can:

• Step 1: Map the end-to-end process flow from the time the customer orders through the phone, and then the kitchen makes the pizza, until it gets delivered to the customer’s address.
• Step 2: Do Value-Stream Mapping. What is Value-Adding to your customer is getting the right pizza delivered at the expected time.
• Step 3: Identify what is Value-Enabling would be the steps you need to do in order to deliver what is Value-Adding to your customer such as the order-taking, billing, cooking, and delivery processes.
• Step 4: Identify all the wastes. Examples can be when the customer is waiting in queue, putting the customer on hold, kitchen and delivery staff waiting for work, efficiency of the kitchen layout, the delivery logistics strategy, etc.
• Step 5: Create the new process flow, pilot it, and then if it works well, establish it as the new standard of doing things.

Six Sigma

On the other hand, Six Sigma is a methodology used to achieve a stable and predictable process by reducing variation, and achieve consistency in delivering results with minimal errors.

You may ask, how many errors is acceptable? In Six Sigma, you’re aiming to achieve 3.4 defects per million opportunities.

You may also ask, what’s acceptable as a stable and predictable process? In Six Sigma, you’re aiming to be within 3 standard deviations above and below the mean (or average).

Let me give you an example. If your pizza business has reduced the average delivery time from 45 minutes down to 30 minutes, it’s time to look at variation.

If your your average is 30 minutes, it could mean that sometimes you deliver in as fast as 15 minutes, and sometimes as slow as 45 minutes.

That may not be good as customers might perceive your delivery service timing to be unstable and unpredictable due to your inconsistency.

Applying Six Sigma principles would allow you to reduce that to as close to 30 minutes as you can consistently be.

That way, customers would perceive your business to be stable and predictable. They can time their meals and not go hungry because they know you can deliver in 30 minutes.

Using Lean and Six Sigma together

As you have seen in the examples, the best time to reduce variation is after all the wastes have been removed, and the process has become Lean. Hence, the 2 methodologies are complimentary to each other.

Lean Six Sigma uses a framework with 5 phases, and it follows the acronym DMAIC, which stands for:

• Define – what is the problem? What is the magnitude of the problem? It is usually based on the Voice of the Customer, Voice of the Employees, Voice of the Business, and the critical outputs that you are expected to deliver
• Measure – what is your baseline? It must be measurable. Remember, what you cannot measure, you cannot control.
• Analyze – this is where you do root cause analysis to pinpoint exactly what is causing your problem
• Improve – here you will identify, pilot, and implement the potential solution/s to the problem
• Control – this phase is critical to ensuring sustainability of your solution/s

Conclusion

Obviously there’s an entire science behind this, and it’s a valuable skill that not everyone has.

But for the exclusive few who have invested their time and effort to learn and practice this skill, their market value is undeniable.

The good thing is, this skill is completely learnable. So if you’re up to the challenge, then start taking control of your career.

Interested? Visit https://robbieagustin.com/courses for more.

Also, download my Free (for a limited time only) ebook – The Business Optimization Blueprint.