Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma is a business improvement methodology which combines tools from both Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma.

Lean manufacturing focuses on speed and traditional Six Sigma focuses on quality.

Combining the two, results in better quality, faster.

The aim of Lean Six Sigma is to mitigate significant failure modes of "Quality Only" Six Sigma when applied to either:

1. reducing variation in a single process step (sub-optimizing)
2. processes which are not value added to the customer.

The DMAIC steps still apply, but the objectives ("Y's") and inputs ("X's") under study incorporate both quality (ppm) as well as speed (cycle time) metrics.

For instance, Lean Six Sigma is often used to add inter-process inspections to identify and eliminate defective units prior to further processing. The waste of processing defective units is eliminated, but at the expense of adding inspection which is in itself waste.

The first failure mode is partially mitigated by adoption of Rolled Throughput Yield analysis tied to cost; but is limited when costs are not tightly monitored at each process step.

Implementing Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma is commonly implemented following a Six Sigma project.

Implementing lean six sigma is done in four simple steps:

1. Identify the processes (in a functional department or business) most important to delivering customer value.
2. Map these processes using Value Stream Mapping.
3. Identify the bottlenecks / constraints in the value stream.
4. Apply variation reduction through DMAIC/DMAD(O)V to standardize the relevant process steps.
   

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