The Benefits of Lean and Six Sigma combined

Lean can be seen as a relentless identification of waste throughout an organisation and its entire supply chain. This will enable your organisation to deliver products and services of the highest quality in an ever increasingly efficient and timely manner. Lean is a culture and will need the engagement of all of your employees to deliver the potential benefits. A culture of continuous improvement and leadership will occur at all levels within the organisation.

Many companies start the Lean journey but few complete the full transformation. The lean message must be led from all areas of the organisation The implementation of Lean principles focuses on understanding value streams and eliminating waste from them, making your organisation agile, profitable and focused on the needs of the customer. Lean methodologies are often encompassed in lean enterprise philosophies that have roots in the Toyota Productions System.

SD&S can be the catalyst to stat and complete the Lean journey in you organisation. We will coach, develop and support the implementation of lean leadership techniques as well as the tools associated with this approach.

Some of the benefits of Lean will be:

• Improvement to your productivity
• Improve the skills level of your people and organization
• More customer oriented processes
• Reduced in-efficiencies
• Decreased downtime of equipment
• Improved adoption of new methods and techniques
• Great output for the same or less effort Improved knowledge and sharing of knowledge
• Improved morale Efficient processes Standardised processes

Six Sigma Process Improvement is a rigorous approach to improving business processes by addressing the underlying causes of variation that lead to poor performance as experienced by the customer. Many organisations ranging from manufacturing to service, in all sectors, have successfully deployed Six Sigma to deliver measurable cost, quality and time based improvements.

Six Sigma is a very statistical based approach of defining operations as systems with inputs, outputs and internal processes. When implementing Six Sigma, an organisation should look to control and reduce variation in its processes to eliminate defects and reduce scrap and rework. This will result in improved quality, and ultimately reduced costs. This is in a design and delivery context.

Lean Six Sigma. Both Lean and Six Sigma methodologies have the capability to stand alone and when implemented correctly, they will deliver real business benefits. If, however they are combined into a combined and co-ordinated Lean Six Sigma methodology then they have the power to deliver fast, substantial and sustained organisational transformations. By implementing the combined tools and techniques of Lean and Six Sigma, any organisation will be equipped to deliver real and sustained improvements which directly benefit the organisation. The journey to implement the methodology is not easy but it will be worth it!

Developing the Lean Six Sigma road-map We understand that each company is different but the transformation journey needs to be facilitated in a structured way. This is a journey and should be managed as such. All employees need to be engaged and wherever you are on the never ending journey that is Lean or Six Sigma, we are sure that we can deliver support through the transfer of knowledge and capability to deliver real results.