Lean Six Sigma | It’s not just for manufacturing
When most people think about Lean Six Sigma, its use in manufacturing to increase productivity and reduce waste comes to mind first. But this Lean methodology has been applied successfully in many other industries, and can help your business become more efficient and sustainable.
What is Lean Six Sigma?
Some organizations gather data, and review their KPI's at regular intervals, yet this valuable information quite often is not used to generate significant cost reductions, eliminate recurrent or new problems, increase operational efficiency, or even improve existing processes.
Lean Six Sigma is a proven combination of tools and techniques that has been used by leading organizations to improve efficiency, productivity and customer satisfaction. It achieves this by providing a rigorous and structured methodology and team approach to problem solving which leads to quality and performance improvements.
When to use Lean Six Sigma
Organizations often use their KPI’s to identify when processes or systems are not delivering their expected results, allowing them to look deeper and identify areas for improvement. One of the biggest challenges is when data and KPI’s show that variability is observed in processes that cannot be explained. Lean Six Sigma will provide you the tools to discover the cause of variability, by guiding you to gather, measure, analyse, and interpret data in a disciplined and methodical way, that will always provide positive results. In these times of crisis, eliminating variability will contribute significantly to reducing your costs by increasing productivity, improving quality, and improving customer satisfaction.
Why your business needs Lean Six Sigma
By focusing on data and verifiable information, it guides teams towards a rigorous analysis of that data in order to solve operational and quality problems, discover cost reduction opportunities, and deploy efficiency projects. It is particularly useful to identify opportunities for improvement not readily identifiable without a detailed statistical analysis of data. Lean Six Sigma is a proven methodology that delivers:
1. Increased revenue
By streamlining processes and increasing capacity, adopting Lean Six Sigma can increase your business’ revenue over time. Lean Six Sigma helps businesses to sell, manufacture, and supply more products or services using less resources.
2. Decreased costs
Lean Six Sigma seeks to remove waste from processes, therefore allowing your business to save costs by eliminating unnecessary activities that could be draining your resources. It can also help you to identify defects in your products or services by focusing on proactive problem solving at the root rather than inspect-and-rework cycles.
3. Increased Customer Satisfaction
Lean Six Sigma puts a strong emphasis on customer needs and requirements. As it focuses not only on improving your product or service, but also improving customer service, Lean Six Sigma can increase customer satisfaction
4. Increased productivity & efficiency
Lean Six Sigma can help your business to specifically measure time spent on activities and identify the root causes of low productivity. Collecting and analysing data will enable you to address the root problems affecting your business. This will not only allow you to increase productivity but also improve time management among your workforce.
5. Improved sustainability
The Lean Six Sigma ideology focuses on reducing waste and making your business processes more efficient. improving processes, reducing defects in your products or services and cutting out waste, Lean Six Sigma will provide a practical approach to sustainability.
Who can benefit from Lean Six Sigma
Lean Six Sigma can deliver results in all types of organisations and industries – not only in Engineering, Manufacturing and Assembly, but also in contact centres, the public sector, including healthcare, and in the software industry.
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