Using Six Sigma

Lean and Six Sigma are two widely acknowledge business process improvement strategies available to organizations today. Lean production is a strategy for achieving continuous improvement in business process performance through the elimination of waste. Six Sigma, on the other hand, is a powerful business strategy used for driving out variability from processes through effective utilisation of statistical tools and techniques. Lean Sigma is an integration of two powerful strategies which can have a dramatic impact on an organisation´s ability to do the things right first time, leading to higher quality, higher productivity, faster delivery and lower costs. Lean Sigma combines the variability reduction tools and techniques from Six Sigma with the waste and non-value added elimination tools and techniques from lean production, to generate monetary savings to the bottom-line of an organisation. In this paper, the results of a survey on current application of Lean Sigma principles for waste reduction, variability reduction and enhanced customer satisfaction are discussed. Lean Sigma is a powerful strategy that can take any manufacturing or service company to a world class performance level. Today many organisations are integrating these two strategies for reducing costs and generating hard-dollar savings to the organisations´ bottomline. Both strategies are complimentary to each other.