Many companies have deployed Six Sigma alone, others only Lean. Few braver ones venture into having both Six Sigma and Lean. All of them have claimed great benefits and savings.
I guess that is because every company must learn and decide which methodology is best for them, and suited to their kind of operations.
There is also another side of the spectrum, which claims that they stick to Six Sigma because Lean would require them to dismiss some of their people. In fact, many employees also have claimed to be displaced because their companies went lean.
This is not the case, however, with Hoffman. When they experienced a slump in 2001, they turned to Lean and Six Sigma to keep the company profitable and able to continue doing business. In so doing, they enjoyed great benefits and savings, and didn’t have to fire a single person.
President Del Nickel had committed the company to the philosophy and worked to ingrain it thoroughly into its culture that the results became significant enough to make a difference.
He began by initiating a number of small projects that would pay big dividends and by keeping the employees apprised of the situation. Seeing how these projects were making a difference, the employees rallied behind Nickel. “You hear horror stories about resistance to change among the workforce,” says Michele Massimino, a Six Sigma Black Belt and director of Lean Enterprise. “It didn’t happen here.”
Besides the series of successes and the continual stream of communication, there is another important reason that the employees supported the effort. “We’ve never fired somebody because of a Lean event,” notes Massimino. “We’ve always reassigned them.”
Source:
Six Sigma Zone News
