Lean Six Sigma Approaches in Manufacturing, Services and Production

In recent years, two methods of improving manufacturing processes have come to the forefront. Six Sigma improves the quality of manufacturing outputs and marketing results by ensuring a minimum amount of errors. Lean manufacturing is a production process that eliminates waste, thereby increasing the endpoint value for the consumer. Both methods have been used successfully by large corporations to increase profits and customer satisfaction. Due to increased globalization and constant technological advances and other competitive pressures, the organizations have to accelerate the pace of change to adapt to new situations. This climate introduces opportunities and threats and organizations have to innovate and strive for operational excellence. Six Sigma is the most popular quality and process improvement methodology which strives for elimination of defects in the processes whose origin is traced back to the pioneering and innovation work done at Motorola and its adoption by many companies including GE, Ford, General Motors, Xerox etc. The primary objective of Six Sigma is to reduce variations, in products and processes, to achieve quality levels of less than 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO). Many organizations have achieved phenomenal success by implementing Lean Six Sigma. As the Six Sigma has evolved during the ensuing 20 years, it had been adopted worldwide and has transformed the way business is done. Lean Six Sigma Approaches in Manufacturing, Services and Production focuses and highlights overview and details of some of the important aspects of 'Lean Six Sigma' and the tools used to implement it in organizations to improve their bottom line by controlling variations in processes, reducing defects to near zero level and adopting lean principles. Lean Six Sigma is a business improvement methodology that aims to maximize shareholders' value by improving quality, speed, customer satisfaction, and costs. It achieves this by merging tools and principles from both Lean and Six Sigma. It has been widely adopted widely in manufacturing and service industries, and its success in some famous organizations (e.g. GE and Motorola) has created a copycat phenomenon, with many organizations across the world willing to replicate the success. Lean and Six Sigma have followed independent paths since the 1980s, when the terms were first hard-coded and defined. The first applications of Lean were recorded in the Michigan plants of Ford in 1913, and were then developed to perfection in Japan (within the Toyota Production System), while Six Sigma saw the light in the United States (within the Motorola Research Centre). Lean is a process-improvement methodology, used to deliver products and services better, faster, and at a lower cost. Lean Six Sigma uses tools from both toolboxes, in order to get the best from the two methodologies, increasing speed while also increasing accuracy. Although services can be consumed and perceived, they cannot be measured easily and objectively, like manufacturing products. An objective measurement is a critical aspect of Six Sigma, which requires data-driven decisions to eliminate defects and reduce variation. The lack of objective metrics is usually addressed in service organizations through the use of proxy metrics.