Introduction to Lean Six Sigma And It's Business Benefits

Welcome to the Six Sigma Line! This series of blog articles addresses topics that we find interesting and provides potentially useful information to anyone trying to enhance their business skills.

The Six Sigma Line: Play Ball

Top management support extends beyond lip service to actual, day-to-day leadership. You need top management to believe that continuous improvement should be a routine way of doing things and that everyone’s job includes looking for ways to optimize their work. Top management needs to hold middle management accountable for improvement results and be involved in project reviews and program progress.

After you’re assured that top management is on the team bus, you’ll build the Steering Team. This team will determine the structure and pace of the program and provide guidance during implementation.

Team members will address questions like:

What areas of our business will we focus on?
What will we measure and how will we measure it?
What are our goals for the program?
Who will champion our efforts?
Who will train our group?
How many projects, how soon?

The team should be diverse, comprise four to six people, and include all levels of the organization. The team reports directly to the top manager in the organization.

The team is charged with the following:

Guiding and steering improvement with a strategy that aligns with the organization’s goals and objectives.
Conducting a baseline assessment to determine starting points and readiness.
Setting priorities and plans.
Monitoring the improvement projects and continually assessing the program.

Knowing where you’re starting from is also essential. Here are some productive questions to ask when conducting your baseline assessment.

Do we have a vision, business strategy, or mission statement?
Do we work well together in teams?
How do we handle communication?
Do we have a quality management system in place? How effective is it? (A documented quality management system should be in place to provide a foundation for the improvement program.)
What are we currently doing to improve?
What are our methods, tools and focus?
Who is involved?
What training is in place?
What metrics are involved?

The Steering Team will review the assessment results and decide what, if any, corrective actions will be needed to fill the gaps before the program begins.

The Six Sigma Line: The Six Sigma Way

Six sigma principles include the following:

Customer focus
Use of teams that are assigned well-defined projects that have direct impact on the organization’s bottom line
Using statistics at all levels
DMAIC approach (define, measure, analyze, improve and control) to problem solving
A management environment that supports these initiatives as a business strategy.

Today, let’s look at the fourth principle: DMAIC, or The Six Sigma Way.

Six Sigma projects follow methodologies derived from Walter Shewhart and W. Edward Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle. This evolved into the DMAIC method, which has five critical phases:

Define the problem
Measure to gather data that describes the current situation
Analyze (Root Cause Analysis)
Improve by choosing and implementing solutions
Control to standardize and sustain the solution

We can further divide the five phases into below steps:

Define

Select an Output Characteristic	What are we improving?
Define Output Performance Standards	What is the standard, or the goal?
Describe the Process	Do we understand everything about the process in question?

Measure

Validate the Measuring System	Can we trust the data?
Gather Data to Establish the Baseline	How bad is it? Or… is it better than we think?
Validate Project Objectives	Now that we know our baseline, is our standard realistic? Will it pass the RUMBA test (we’ll explore that more in a future post)?

Analyze

Identify Potential Causes	Gather up as many suspects as possible.
Screen Potential Causes	Screen the suspects down to a manageable number that may be tested.
Determine the Root Cause	Choose the most likely to test and confirm.

Improve

Identify Solution(s)	Select the best solutions.
Re-evaluate the Measuring System	Can you still trust the data?
Gather Data to Document the Improvements	How much did we improve?

Control

Sustain and Spread

Implement controls to maintain the gains (no backsliding), and see if the improvements can be applied to other areas.

Every organization is different and projects vary from company to company. As such, not every one of the steps above will apply to every project.

However, if you decide to omit a step, make sure that the team agrees that the step isn’t applicable. Be sure to note this on your project charter and describe the reasoning behind the omission.

Remember that the best way to become competent in the Six Sigma Way is through repetition.

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