Lean Six Sigma influence
IBM created its global delivery framework to increase its productivity and improve its quality into the company. Togaf (an enterprise architecture methodology for business) adopted value streams in its phase A — Architecture vision and/or phase B — Business architecture, and dedicated a serie guide to value streams. Agile development teams usually apply a kanban tool to keep up general work and some agile's branch work closely to eliminate waste during Software development . OutSystems created The Small Book of The Few Big Rules and uses "Ask Why" in its rule number 1 to search the root cause of problems, and Pareto in its rule number 5 to determine what is most important. What all these examples have in common? In some way, they use Lean Six Sigma (LSS) tools or concepts.
LSS is so powerful, at least, for me, that I use it to improve my work and my life. If you are interested in learn a little more about LSS, and from the beginning, this is the right place for you :)
Lean Six Sigma Integration
Total Quality Management (TQM) became very popular in the beginning of the 1990s among researchers and practitioners in order to describe how organizations should work to obtain better performance and customer satisfaction. Lean Six Sigma and Lean appeared due to the evolution of quality in Japan. The first one had the contribution from Motorola and the second one from Toyota (Anderson, Eriksson, & Torstensson, 2006). The explanation and history of them will appear inside many papers related to these subjects as (Tjahjono, et al., 2010), (Ray & John, 2011), and (Anderson, Eriksson, & Torstensson, 2006), however, the used here came from (Salah, Rahim, & Carretero, 2010) that proposed the integration of both.
The Six Sigma methodology is a well-disciplined and structured approach used to enhance process performance and achieve high levels of quality and low levels of variability. Six Sigma quality means only two defects exist per billion opportunities. The necessity to operate at such low level of defect may not always be economical. Motorola’s Six Sigma quality program was created in 1987 and created a number of steps to achieve Six Sigma, which was later replaced by the four phases of measure, analyze, improve and control by General Electric (GE). After that, the define phase was added before the measure phase to form the well-known define, measure, analyze, improve and control process (DMAIC). When the product or service under consideration is under major design change requirements or still at the early stages of development, the five phases that are used become define, measure, analyze, design and verify (DMADV) or design for Six Sigma (DFSS). The goal of DMADV is to strive to achieve a Six Sigma level right from the early design. The Six Sigma approach starts with the identification of the need for an improvement initiative.
The lean methodology is proven to help organizations achieve on time delivery of the right quality and quantity to satisfy customers. Lean is unique as it focuses on enabling people to see the product or service and the whole value stream from the perspective of the customer. Lean is used to eliminate waste, variation and work imbalance. By waste, it means unnecessarily long cycle times, or waiting times between value-added activities. Waste can also include rework or scrap, which is often the result of excess variability, so there is an obvious connection between Six Sigma and Lean.
When we move the context from manufacture to a knowledge worker (KW) there is a problem because the office-based knowledge work is so diversified that stablishing any detailed work procedure commonly applicable to all workers has been hard (Maruta, 2012). However, Maruta conducted a research using a customized PDCA. The PDCA cycle was initially used as a quality improvement method in production lines: management formulates a “plan” for improvement, workers “do” the planned implementation, inspectors “check” workers’ achievements and “action” referred to the corrective actions taken by management in case errors or defects found. The final conclusion was that the PDCA concept can be applied to any KW facing an objective under a time constraint. Its utilization is expected to yield two key effects: enhanced achievement and improved insight capability.
In a summary, the main objective of Six Sigma is "reduce variation" and that of lean is "reduce cycle time". The LSS approach joins together data-driven Six Sigma approach with the value-centered lean tools (Ray & John, 2011).
Bibliography
Anderson, R., Eriksson, H., & Torstensson, H. (2006). Similarities and differences between TQM, six sigma and lean. The TQM Magazine, 18(3), pp. 282–296.
Maruta, R. (2012). Maximizing Knowledge Work Productivity: A Time Constrained and Activity Visualized PDCA Cycle. Knowledge and Process Management, 19, Number 4, pp. 203–214.
Ray, S., & John, B. (2011). Lean Six-Sigma application in business process outsourced organization. International Journal of Lean Six Sigma, 2(4), pp. 371–380.
Salah, S., Rahim, A., & Carretero, J. A. (2010). The integration of Six Sigma and lean management. International Journal of Lean Six Sigma, 1(3), pp. 249–274.
Tjahjono, B., Ball, P., Vitanov, V. I., Scorzafave, C., Nogueira, J., Calleja, J., . . . Yadav, A. (2010). Six Sigma: a literature review. International Journal of Lean Six Sigma, 1(3), pp. 216–233.