abhishreshthaa
Abhijeet S
Is This a Six Sigma, Lean, or Kaizen Project?
This is a familiar question that is often addressed by organizations. In fact, it's the wrong question. These concepts are nothing more than tools in your management toolbox. You don't fix a watch with a hammer, and you get the same results when you deploy Six Sigma, Lean, and Kaizen incorrectly.
The fact is, a business problem is a business problem, and it needs to be fixed. Understanding the application of these tools to various improvement opportunities is the key to success.
People spend months drilling the Six Sigma process and statistical tools into their heads until they look at every situation as a Six Sigma problem. Why not? It was a very successful and rewarding experience for these individuals. But it's also easy to make mountains out of molehills.
You don't want the organization running around performing DOEs on the internal mail system or the quality of cafeteria food. On the other extreme, some high anxiety managers tend to look at very complex process variation or larger scale strategic problems as a Kaizen Blitz that can be fixed by tomorrow.
They're looking for instantaneous improvements in more complex areas such as variance reduction, customer returns, or forecast accuracy. For these situations, one question to reflect upon is "How long did it take us to get into this situation?"
The most important driver of breakthrough improvement is leadership, creativity, and innovation. Executives must lead and mentor their people in the right directions and assure that their actions are linked to strategic performance. They need to deploy limited resources to the highest impact areas and not try to solve every problem in the company.
To accomplish this, they need to understand Six Sigma, Lean, Kaizen, and other improvement methodologies, and how to integrate these tools into an overall business improvement strategy.
This is a familiar question that is often addressed by organizations. In fact, it's the wrong question. These concepts are nothing more than tools in your management toolbox. You don't fix a watch with a hammer, and you get the same results when you deploy Six Sigma, Lean, and Kaizen incorrectly.
The fact is, a business problem is a business problem, and it needs to be fixed. Understanding the application of these tools to various improvement opportunities is the key to success.
People spend months drilling the Six Sigma process and statistical tools into their heads until they look at every situation as a Six Sigma problem. Why not? It was a very successful and rewarding experience for these individuals. But it's also easy to make mountains out of molehills.
You don't want the organization running around performing DOEs on the internal mail system or the quality of cafeteria food. On the other extreme, some high anxiety managers tend to look at very complex process variation or larger scale strategic problems as a Kaizen Blitz that can be fixed by tomorrow.
They're looking for instantaneous improvements in more complex areas such as variance reduction, customer returns, or forecast accuracy. For these situations, one question to reflect upon is "How long did it take us to get into this situation?"
The most important driver of breakthrough improvement is leadership, creativity, and innovation. Executives must lead and mentor their people in the right directions and assure that their actions are linked to strategic performance. They need to deploy limited resources to the highest impact areas and not try to solve every problem in the company.
To accomplish this, they need to understand Six Sigma, Lean, Kaizen, and other improvement methodologies, and how to integrate these tools into an overall business improvement strategy.