Lean Six Sigma : combining Six Sigma quality with lean speed

by Michael L. George

The Breakthrough Program for Increasing Quality, Shortening Cycle Times, and Creating Shareholder Value In Every Area of Your Organization Time and quality are the two most important metrics in improving any company's production and profit performance. Lean Six Sigma explains how to impact your company's performance in each, by combining the strength of today's two most important initiatives--Lean Production and Six Sigma--into one integrated program. The first book to provide a step-by-step roadmap for profiting from the best elements of Lean and Six Sigma, this breakthrough volume will show you how Separately, Lean Production and Six Sigma have changed the face of the manufacturing business. Together, they become an unprecedented tool for improving product and process quality, production efficiency, and across-the-board profitability. Lean Six Sigma introduces you to today's most dynamic program for streamlining the performance of both your production department and your back office, and providing you with the cost reduction and quality improvements you need to stay one step ahead of your competitors. " Lean Six Sigma shows how Lean and Six Sigma methods complement and reinforce each other. If also provides a detailed roadmap of implementation so you can start seeing significant returns in less than a year."----From the Preface Businesses fundamentally exist to provide returns to their stakeholders. Lean Six Sigma outlines a program for combining the synergies of these two initiatives to provide your organization with greater speed, less process variation, and more bottom-line impact than ever before. A hands-on guidebook for integrating the production efficiencies of the Lean Enterprise with the cost and quality tools of Six Sigma, this breakthrough book features detailed insights "Variation is evil."----Jack Welch Six Sigma was the zero-variation quality lynchpin around which Jack Welch transformed GE into one of the world's most efficient--and valuable--corporations. Lean Production helped Toyota cut waste, slash costs, and substantially improve resource utilization and cycle times. Yet, as both would admit, there was still room for improvement. Lean Six Sigma takes you to the next level of improvement, one that for the first time unites product and process excellence with the goal of enhancing shareholder value creation. Providing insights into the application of Lean Six Sigma to both the manufacturing processes and the less-data-rich service and transactional processes, it promises to revolutionize the performance efficiencies in virtually every area of your organization--as it positively and dramatically impacts your shareholder value.

Genres: Business, Leadership, Nonfiction, Management

300 pages, Hardcover

First published April 25, 2002

About the author

Michael L. George is founder and President of The George Group, the largest Lean Six Sigma consulting practice in the United States. He wrote the successful and influential Lean Six Sigma, also published by McGraw-Hill.

Source: Bookish

Reviews

[Maciej Nowicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lean Six Sigma is about project management in a business context. The book goes through the major principles of Six Sigma and Lean methodology. Although I have found the reading a bit shallow here and there, you might treat it as guidance into the world of advanced project management. You also need some basic background in Six Sigma best practice. Apparently, it’s not only about allocating people, assigning goals and milestones.

Anyway, have you ever thought about gathering only the right people together, putting them all in one room and using their skills to mitigate a problem or to improve on one area or process? Well, now you can do it by using Six Sigma.

This method can focus on different objectives and scopes, such as to understand how the value stream flows or does not flow due to mistakes. It can also concentrate on delays, bottlenecks, prioritisation what’s important to customers in order to identify key process metrics. It can also get into brainstorms, generate ideas and prioritise solution alternatives, reduce equipment setup, develop or redesign procedures or standard work, or finally, reorganise a work area in order to improve workflow.

It is worth to say that the key to success is planning. Planning should be more than half of the total effort. It should start at least three to four weeks before the project or even months comparable to project scope or a company’s size. Sufficient time and effort should be allocated to gather existing data, obtain primary information from process stakeholders, identify the objective and scope of the event, and develop the agenda. Then you have to identify and invite the right participants for this event.

When you have your goal and team then you can start working on data using tools mentioned below:
• Value stream mapping and process maps to provide a common understanding of what is currently going on
• Gemba Walk to see at locations where work is done
• Process and value add analysis to identify non-value adding steps
• Rework your bottlenecks
• Build spaghetti diagrams to map the physical flow of parts or transactions in a facility
• DOWNTIME and TIM WOODS approaches to identify the different types of waste
• Pareto analysis using available data to focus the analysis
• Brainstorming
• Cause-effect diagrams
• 5 Whys to quickly identify potential causes
• Creativity techniques to develop solution alternatives, such as multi-voting and prioritization matrices to select alternatives
• Reduction and workload analysis to enable smaller batches and reduce cycle time

The book does not go through all the aforementioned tools, nevertheless, I believe that some elementary knowledge about them would enhance the whole Six Sigma project and would give you a much wider understating in generating the right hypothesis.

The next phase is about addressing the proven hypothesis by generating potential solutions, evaluating alternatives and, finally, selecting the right set of solutions to implement. Before the full implementation, you should go with pilot testing which would give you the opportunity to determine optimal settings. In this phase, you have to remember about your key stakeholders which are process operators and owners, managers and others who might be touched by the issue. Their role is absolutely critical.

The last phase is the control phase. The main role of it is... (if you like to read my full review please visit my blog https://leadersarereaders.blog/lean-s...)

[Abolfazl Fattahi · Rating 3 out of 5]

شش سیگمای ناب، دو اصل مهم بهبود عصر حاضر را با یکدیگر تلفیق می کند. این دو اصل عبارتند از، انجام بهتر کار از طریق شش سیگما و انجام سریع تر کار از طریق اصول ناب. شما در این کتاب، با نحوه به کارگیری ابزارهای موجود در شش سیگمای ناب با هدف شناسایی و حذف اتلاف ها و مشکلات کیفی در سازمان ها توسعه داده شده اند آشنا می شوید. کتاب «شش سیگمای ناب چیست؟» نوشته مایکل جورج، دیو رولندز و بیل کاسل و ترجمه رسول نورالسناء و عباس سقایی که توسط انتشارات ترمه چاپ شده، در برگیرنده مثال های واقعی متعددی است، این کتاب شامل چهار اصل کلیدی شش سیگمای ناب و نحوه به کارگیری آنها در محیط کاری شما می باشد که عبارتند از:

مشتریان خود را با سرعت و کیفیت خشنود سازید.
فرآیند های خود را بهبود دهید.
با یکدیگر کار کنید تا دست آوردهای شما افزایش یابد.
تصمیمات خود را بر اساس داده ها و حقایق اتخاذ کنید.

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Before I start for real, one key point:

My rating and review below is not for Lean Six Sigma as a methodology, but this particular book about LSS. Personally, I'm an enthusiast of Lean approach and I respect Six Sigma as well, but it doesn't mean that I'll praise every book about any of these two.

Now, to the point:

This is a book that supposedly has started LSS worldwide - it describes how your business could benefit from combining quality of Six Sigma and speed of Lean. Unfortunately, it makes a mediocre read... This book suffers from one of the most common sins of management (in general) related books: it's extremely repetitive and far too wordy. I wanted to kill something when I was reading for the nth time about "how important CEOs involvement is" or that "the suitable projects have to be chosen carefully" for LSS optimization.

With all the respect, the truly valuable content of this book could be summarized in 30 pages max. It could be extended by providing some useful real life case studies, but these are not present in this book.

To summarize - LSS is awesome, but this book is boring as hell.

[Matthew K]

insight forever to complex problems

[Royel Hassan]

Good

[Aaron Tan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's more of a reference book rather than a book for application learning. People with no background in Lean Six Sigma (LSS) or just started learning would find it difficult to grasps the concept.

For people with LSS background, would find this useful to a certain extent.

In summary, good and interesting read for me, but would not recommend to people starting out on LSS.

[Jarrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a little hard to follow at first without guidance. When I attended white belt orientation, what I read started making sense. This book is my Lean 6 Sigma Bible now that I'm in black belt training.

[Kayjay]

I just completed a Lean for Services training offered by the George Group, so I'm excited to get George's take on more fully aligning Lean and Six Sigma.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

I need the beginner edition. This was far above my head.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dense read, pretty good so far though. Conversational start.

[Betty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walked through this book while taking the Green Belt class. It was good to have an instructor focus on what to pay most attention to. It's a good reference book.

[Tony Wong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good concept. Could have done a better job explaining the application of it. It's not that complex but the communication of it makes it seem that way.

[Fahad Obaid · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب جيد جدا يعطي مقدمة طيبة عن موضوع Lean Six Sigma