Lean Six Sigma:why Do You Need to Improve Your Processes?

Once you understand your customers, the next step is figuring out a way to get better at delivering what they want. The answer lies in improving the processes your company uses to generate the services and products you sell.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician who led the quality movement in Japan (and later in America), spent much of his time trying to convince people that most quality problems are “in the process, not the person.” For most of his 60+ year career, he promoted his 85/15 rule, based on his experience that 85% of problems were built into the way work was done (and hence under the control of management). Only 15% of the problems, he said, were really the fault of individual employees.

Most frontline employees had no trouble accepting Dr. Deming’s assertions. After all, they were the people who paid the price for a lack of training, poor equipment, little communication, and unrealistic goals. In short, they worked under conditions that guaranteed poor quality. It was often managers who resisted Dr. Deming, because they were trained to find “who to blame” when something went wrong.

In the last few years of his life, Dr. Deming admitted his 85/15 ratio was probably wrong. More than likely, he said, it’s 96% of problems that are built into the work system. Individual employees, he concluded, could only control perhaps 4%!

Why does it matter if most problems are “in the system”? Because it means that if you want to improve quality, you have to change the way work is done. That’s why Lean Six Sigma focuses on process improvement. In fact, the purpose of most improvement efforts is to use data to find out what’s wrong in the system that allows the problems to happen in the first place. Removing these problems will allow your company to provide better products and services to customers.

What does it take to improve processes?

You and everyone else reading this book has some process knowledge, simply as a result of performing your job day in and day out. But more than likely, you’ve never been asked to document that knowledge, or discuss it with others doing the same kind of work. Perhaps no one has ever used the term “process” before in regards to your work. When something goes wrong, people have only their experience and trial-and-error to come up with a solution.

All of that changes with Lean Six Sigma. There is a great deal of emphasis on:

· Documenting how work gets done (the steps that comprise the process)

· Examining the flow of work between people or workstations

· Giving people the knowledge and methods they need to constantly improve that work

There are a lot of different process improvement methods, some of which are covered later in this book. But almost all of them serve one of two purposes:

· To eliminate variation in quality and speed (a major source of defects)

· To improve process flow and speed

The majority of process improvement work you’ll ever do falls into one of those two categories, so we’ll spend a little time explaining what each of them means.