About Six Sigma

Why Six Sigma with an emphasis on Lean?

Six Sigma emphasizes selecting a project that provides the greatest financial returns or the greatest savings to a firm. It also suggests selecting a financial person on your team to ratify all of these savings. What has been learned over the years is that the true savings in most projects initiated are unknown and unknowable (Deming). Second, the greatest savings can be a series of many smaller improvement events; they do not have to be major events.

Lean or Kaizen-Lean allows us to attack small and short-term projects in our continuous efforts to improve. We need to first understand Muda or all waste and prioritize and attack these improvement efforts in isolation without having to establish each activity as a major project. The emphasis is always for us to be system oriented and know what results we expect before initiating any activities in isolation.

Six Sigma provides a great format for projects. Lean allows us to work on those projects while continuously improving.