Posted by:
meikah | 10 September 2007 | 8:38 pm
Last Friday, I attended Neville Clarke-Philippine‘s seminar on Empowering Management for a Successful Lean Six Sigma. Armed with theories on Lean and Six Sigma, I went there to accompany two of my colleagues, one of them is our operations manager. I am glad that management had sent three people to a seminar like this, albeit only introductory.
Because the seminar was only an intro to a full-blown trainings on Lean and Six Sigma, I was expecting only to be hearing about the same Lean and Six Sigma insights that I had been reading and even writing about. To my surprise, one thing was made clear to me by the competent seminar facilitator—no other than Neville Clarke’s country manager, Maria Nenita Asuncion Concio.
Here are the things I learned:
- Know the processes of your organizations first.
- Determine what your organization needs to do by listening to the Voice of the Customer. If it needs to simplify processes or structure, going lean may be the way to go. If you need consistency, or you need to reduce variation in your products or outputs, going Six Sigma could be the answer.
- Knowing the need and determining which methodology to adopt is one important step to any improvement initiative.
- Once you know which improvement initiative—may it be Lean or Six Sigma—you need, then you arm yourself with the corresponding tool sets.
- If your organization needs both simplicity and consistency, then Lean Six Sigma may be the answer.
- Lean enables Six Sigma quality (reduced inventories, exposes quality issues); Six Sigma quality enables Lean speed (fewer defects means less time spent on reworks. (From Neville Clarke’s notes)
- Lean eliminates non-value added steps or waste from the process. (From Six Sigma Institute)
- Six Sigma improve quality of value add steps by reducing the variability in the process. (From Six Sigma Institute)
