Lean Manufacturing Six SigmaWhat happens when two techniques or set of practices, both conceptually different, are brought together? You achieve speed, discipline and excellence in quality from the manufacturing processes. Lean Manufacturing Six Sigma is a collaboration of techniques from Lean Manufacturing and the Six Sigma approach. Ideally, the Six Sigma approach provides the impetus to excellence in quality aspect whereas the Lean technique focuses on speed with discipline. An example in the case…. My mind rolls back to a company which used to manufacture printers for its customers. Based on a lot of complaints that it received from the customers on the quality of the products, the company established a small team to understand what was going wrong. The small process improvement found that the manufacturing processes were highly unorganized. This led to slowing down of the end production time and also caused variations in quality. All the company did to fix this was streamline its processes and it was able to deliver quality, cost-efficient products. Moral - one can achieve speed with quality only if it has discipline. What does Lean Manufacturing Six Sigma advocate? Lean Six Sigma deploys this concept for manufacturing processes to come up with a streamlined set of processes which would deliver quality products with speed and maintaining the discipline factor as well. Lean Six Sigma means that processes would need to be streamlined to achieve quality products efficiently. The Toyota lean manufacturing technique is a classic example in this case. Toyota has reengineered its production processes by the name of Toyota Production Systems and deploys Just In Time Production with Six Sigma approach to generate maximum cost advantage off its production processes. Lean Six Sigma can be applied to a value-stream which is highly testing-sensitive like software development. By using Lean Six Sigma, one can streamline processes in software development which would include naming and coding conventions, algorithm designing, coding, testing and integration. Employing Six Sigma with lean techniques adds the speed aspect to the software development process. Lean Manufacturing advocates the principle of knowledge creation whereas Six Sigma counsels Knowledge replication. Companies who intend employing Lean Six Sigma would need to be careful in getting the right mix of both to ensure that the basic purpose of Lean Manufacturing - knowledge creation is not defeated. Knowledge replication would result in a lean process would result in slower cycle times and a lot of redundancy. And it is the knowledge creation step advocated by Lean Manufacturing techniques which helps in maintaining short, frequent learning cycles. Professionals with lean six sigma certification enable companies to create lean six sigma processes in their production cycle. |