There are several ways of integrating Lean and Six Sigma for operational excellence. Most discussions end at Lean Six Sigma (integrated in Belt curricula and concepts and tools used in projects as suitable) being the right approach.

However, as companies need to have an approach at strategic level and an approach at operational task level, how do you bind the thoughts? Does Lean provide the concepts and Six Sigma is meant for execution? Or would you say, the Y to X drill down (of Six Sigma) provides the journey and lean completes the picture by involving people down the line. Or would you let both flow simultaneously with Vice President (Lean) and Vice President (Six Sigma) being parallel positions?

 

I believe, the ss and lean complement each other, and are synergistic. While both can go independent of each other; like lifting a heavy object with single hand, ss+l is like lifting the same object using both hands. The difference it makes need not be over emphasized!

While SS focuses on where something is really happening, LEAN focuses on where nothing is happening, but being projected as everything is happening! But one thing is for sure,  there is much more money (ground+low level+mid level+top level) to be saved where nothing happens, compared to where some thing really happens.

While it is quite easy to appreciate the lean-focus, in my opinion the root cause of the anti-lean mess lies in the "baba adam" accounting and financial principles and practices!

K.M.Date

Principal Facilitator - INFERSTAT

Based on my experience as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt with a GE subsidiary, the recommended umbrella approach should be to create a culture of customer focus & continuous improvement based on a robust process managment framework across the organisation rather than debating between Lean & Six Sigma. As pointed out by several people in this discussion, the two are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. 

While GE started with Six Sigma as its umbrella approach it has adopted Lean in a big way now. However, Six Sigma continues to be applied to areas where root causes cannot be arrived at by simply doing Why-Why analysis, and therfore, some data analysis is necessary.

Dear VK,

I have experienced situations in companies where there were parallel organizations for Lean and Six Sigma and it is counter-productive. There is usually a battle for projects as each wants to use their approach to solve problems so that they can claim the benefits.

It is better to have an integrated approach so that the organizational conflicts and duplications are minimized and the right integrated approach can be used to solve the problems.

SJ.

Lean is always complements any continuous improvement problems or issues. We need to get organized before getting to the bottom of the issue. Six Sigma targets variability and removes it with a very determined effort. No need to choose between the two and better to use both in any organization. From my experience I would say do Lean first and then parallel or otherwise, take many Six Sigma initiatives to root out your variabilities to have a high quality robust product/service.

Still Lean will be required always,  atleast in the form of 5S to keep your house in order. While ISO insisted on continual improvement in organizations, Lean took a special attention through 5S, Kanban , Pull-system, Poka-yok and other tools.  It helps Six Sigma to provide data also in a very methodical manner without any confusions if you have implemented Lean first.

My experience says that having a parallel Six Sigma and Lean organizations end up as competing organizations and becomes a ripe ground for a political battle between the two respective leaders (I won't name the organization but I have seen this first hand). The organization is the loser in the end.

Conceptually speaking there is no conflict between the two approaches and a blended approach becomes really powerful. Lean having come from Practice to Theory has its own inherent strengths specially when it comes to Process Analysis, inventory management and productivity improvements. Thus,broadly speaking Lean is most powerful when it comes to improving the Business Process Efficiency or the "efficiency metrics". On the other hand core strength of Six Sigma lies in reducing "variation" in the process which translates to improving the Business Process Effectiveness measures. Hence, broadly six sigma is best when it comes to impacting the effectiveness metrics that have strong correlation with customer satisfaction.

Now coming to the strategic level and operational level implementation, my experience says that the best structure is wherein we have a single leader who may be called as an "Operational Excellence Leader", "Process Improvement Leader" and so on. This leader reports to the CEO or the SBU Head (depending on the type of organization). Under him we have the "belts" or persons who are trained in both Lean & Six Sigma. The primary objective of this organization is to help in achieving breakthrough business results on revenue enhancement, cost reduction, customer satisfaction etc. The initiatives that they lead or mentor come under the umbrella of "Business Process Improvement". They are free to use the most appropriate tools and techniques for a particular initiative. There is no seperate "six sigma project" or a"lean project" but a "process improvement project" which will operationalize the integrated (lean+six sigma) approach. This diverts the focus and energies of this group towards giving business results by way of process improvements instead of getting lost in "six sigma vs lean debate". Moreover, when these belts train the operators or grass root level people they would equip them with the basic tools needed at that level by naming them "process improvement tools" instead of categorizing them as "six sigma tools" or "lean tools" seperately. This naming itself would play a major role in operationalizing the blended approach and thereby enabling the organization to benefit from the strengths of both Lean and Six Sigma.

Dear VK,

I agree with most of the views confirming both the approaches as complementing each other for operational excellence and I totally agree with Mr Manish's views that the projects should be considered as process improvement projects rather than Lean or Six Sigma labels.

I would like to add one very important approach of Lean which is most important or we can say is the central to all the projects to be decided is to identify the bottleneck resource(operation) & the projects should be taken to de-bottleneck it with any of the tools (L or SS) & move on to find the next bottleneck in a way to continously improve, since the bottom line can be improved only by increasing the Thruput & any improvement done on no-bottleneck resource is not going to increase the thruput.

best regards,

Rajeev Kamboj