Today’s business environment is highly competitive hence companies must continuously pursue ways of improving their bottom line (Shah et al. 2015). As a result, businesses have always ventured for improvement in their processes. Among the numerous process improvement methodologies, lean production and Six Sigma are viewed as a great way for industries, businesses and individuals to achieve success via efficiency and effectiveness (Shah et al. 2015). However, applying only one of these methodologies attracts some significant drawbacks; the continuous improvement might have the deficiency of being slow. This essay hence focuses on the concepts of lean production and Six Sigma.
Six Sigma refers to a collection of tools and techniques designed for process improvement (Charantimath, 2012). This concept was invented in 1986 by Bill Smith as he worked at Motorola. In 1995, Jack Welch incorporated this concept as the core of his business strategy while at General Electric. Six Sigma focuses on quality of the output of a process through identification and removal of the causes of defects and to minimize variability within the business or production process. It deploys some quality management approaches like statistical and empirical methods. Each Six Sigma project follows a properly defined sequence of steps and has particular value targets, for example, reduce pollution, increase profits, increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs.
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Lean production commonly known as lean refers to a set of business strategies, practices, and methods which emphasize on continuous improvement and waste elimination (Redmond et al. 2008). This concept originated from Toyota. It helps companies to attain timely delivery of the right quantity and quality to satisfy customers. Lean focuses on eliminating waste created via imbalance and waste created via variation in workloads. Waste includes long waiting times, long cycle times and reworks which normally cause excess variability. From the consumer perspective, value refers to any survive, product or action that a customer would be willing to pay for. The concept of lean makes obvious what brings value through reducing everything that does not add value. In this view, there is a significant relationship between lean production and Six Sigma hence the name Lean Six Sigma (Deming et al. 2012).
Lean Six Sigma has been widely used to describe the combination of lean and Six Sigma (Charantimath, 2012). Organizations are presently integrating lean and Six Sigma to achieve process effectiveness and efficiency. Although the two are implemented as a single framework, companies can achieve a certain balance by integrating them effectively. It is important to achieve equilibrium between the two since companies run into risk by becoming extremely lean and hence rigid in responses to the market environment and subsequently hampering value creation. On the other side, excess emphasis on eliminating variation beyond customer requirements may waste unnecessary resources in the pursuit of zero variation (Shah et al. 2015). Therefore, organizations must create sufficient value from the consumer perspective to achieve equilibrium. This will help to maintain market share while at the same time, reducing variation to acceptable levels so that the company can lower costs by eliminating instances of process over-engineering (Redmond et al. 2008).
The concept of Six Sigma compliments the concept of lean by offering knowledge and tools required to deal with particular problems which are detected along the journey (Shah et al. 2015). Lean aims to eliminate noise and establish a standard. Such consolidation yields some very significant benefits. For instance, organizations can maintain processes on target and effectively minimize waste incurred via faulty processing through integrating lean with other Six Sigma tools such as control charts for achieving quality. Also, Lean Six Sigma is widely acknowledged as a leadership development tool. The advantage of this incorporation rests on the capacity to develop a cadre of unique leaders.
Charantimath (2012) suggests key success factors for the use of Lean Six Sigma in an organization. They include appropriate selection of people, leadership alignment, accountability, supply chain management, information technology, employee motivation, and training. Moreover, for lean six sigma to succeed in an organization, there is a strong need for top management involvement, technology exploitation, and communication channels.
Although Edwards Deming did not create the name Total Quality Management (TQM), he is popularly known as the father of the TQM movement (Deming et al. 2012). In fact, his research has made significant contributions to the field of quality management. He is popularly known for his 14 point management philosophy. Research after research of greatly successful corporations highlights that deploying the philosophy yields significant improvements (Shah et al. 2015). Leading Japanese companies such as Fuji, Toyota, and Sony just to mention a few, have registered great success after applying Deming’s ideas. The quality of these companies has grown far superior compared to that of that of their global rivals, and their costs are much lower, too. In fact, since the 70s, the demand for products sold by these companies soared, and many of them continue to dominate the global market (Charantimath, 2012). This has prompted European and American companies to realize that they can no longer continue to ignore Deming’s quality revolution. For this reason, Deming’s 14 points have become a standard reference point for quality transformation.
Conclusively, we know that quality must be built into each level of an organization and make it part of everything that the organization does. This also applies to my personal life from answering my phone calls to service my food to arranging my closet; quality is key to success in life. I believe that the world owes this transformation to Edwards Deming, the father of quality management. In his research, he concludes that, by improving quality, businesses can reduce expenses while at the same time increasing market share and productivity.
References
Charantimath, P. M. (2012). Total quality management . Delhi: Pearson.
Deming, W. E., Orsini, J. ., Deming, C. D., (Edited, B. O. J., Orsini, J. E. B., & Deming, C. D. E. B. (2012). Essential Deming . New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing.
Redmond, R., Curtis, E., Noone, T., & Keenan, P. (2008). Quality in Higher Education: The Contribution of Edward Demings Principles. International Journal of Educational Management. 22, 432-441.
Shah, F. T., Shamail, S., & Ahmad Akhtar, N. (2015). Lean quality improvement model for quality practices in software industry in Pakistan. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process. 27, 237-254.
