Literature Review Of Lean Six Sigma In Small And Medium Enterprises

Lean production and Six Sigma help a company to make the production and the workers work more efficient. The processes allow different types of programs to be put in place to ensure the workers and the production process operate at the optimal levels. The processes ensure that each element of the production and looks at each step to ensure that the process is working in a more efficient way (Wisner , Tan, & Leong, 2012).

In this document we have done a detailed study of Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma and how they help Business Analysts to maximize their skill sets to attain maximum process improvements in their activities. We introduce the topic, provide a historical timeline and disucuss its relevance to the topic. After that, we analyze current state and use the information to provide results in Analysis and Synthesis section.

Successful Lean Six Sigma (LSS) deployments rely on the ability of a deployment to effectively apply Six Sigma DMAIC methodologies with the ability to concurrently apply Lean tools in order to drive Continuous Improvement into the culture of the business. Designing a Lean Six Sigma deployment to be an integrated model ties together the Six Sigma well structured approach with the Lean approach of matching quantity and quality to satisfy customers. Various companies have begun

Lean Six Sigma approach is recognized widely and has been implemented predominately in manufacturing rather than other industries. To illustrate the point, this paper draws attention to the adoption of Lean Six Sigma in various industries with a case study. The combination of Lean tools and Six Sigma methodology is used to improve the process and quality by eliminating the variations and creating workflow in a process. The hypothesis of this study was that the Six Sigma technique can be used along with lean tools in order to improve process and quality in any area of industries. The review of case study discovered the use of

This essay is going to analyze a case study based on lean thinking principles and techniques. It is could divide in four significant parts. First, to outline the definitions of Lean manufacturing philosophy and applied the strategies to achieving, next create future state Value Stream Map, Furthermore justification Lean Six Sigma tools and techniques, which would appropriate, and critically discussed the key successful should his idea to the Evenort Company.

70). The integration of Lean and Six Sigma can create a methodology that yield better result than what individual methods would achieve. Even though six sigma and lean have evolved from separate paths, there are many aspects that make the two approaches compatible. Combing lean and six sigma approach can provide the organisation with many benefits. Lean brings intuition and action into the organisation, enabling the workforce to carry out swift improvements via the kaizen events. This makes lean approach an important method of enhancing productivity, eliminating unnecessary process and changing culture. Six Sigma applies statistical tools to reveal the origin of defects. The two approaches are synergistic, even though they evolved from separate

Since the core of Six Sigma management is quality, it is consistent with lean thinking. Use lean thinking which is focusing on eliminating waste and identifying improvement. When fused with the main elements in lean production, such as 5S system, TPM, stability and standardization6, the Six Sigma production system can be better operated. Quality can prove its own value only if product can best serve customer and provides benefits to shareholders, so when comes to the quality issue, doing statistical analysis about the customers’ demand and company’s goals is essential for the “master black belt” and “black belt ” to lead teams to right places.

In last 25 years many companies are adopting Six Sigma methodology as a process excellence tool. Few of them are GE, Motorola, Siemens, ABB, Citi Bank, Ford etc. Many Japanese and Korean companies like LG, Toshiba, Honda, Sony and Samsung have also implemented Six Sigma. In India many companies are implementing Six Sigma. Wipro, Mahindra & Mahindra, Tata motors, Larsen & Toubro, HDFC are some of them. Due to globalization world market is opened to Indian organizations and to compete with other countries they want to bring their products & services to world class level. To achieve this along with various methodologies Six Sigma is becoming popular in India.

Lean and six sigma approaches have been important tools for continuous improvements used by many companies for more than two decades. The Lean manufacturing approach stresses that the key ‘thrust' is combining all the tools to generate an efficient, first-rate system that creates products at the demand of the consumers with minimal or no waste (Brady & Allen 2006, P 334). On the other hand, six sigma's groundwork is in statistical testing. In this vein, the basic evaluation index is defects per thousand opportunities that could encompass aspects such as piece material, component and administrative form. Six Sigma applies the DMAIC process that collapsed the underlying project into phases (Baird 2009, p. 130). Both approaches have enabled

Lean Six Sigma is an approach that combines Six Sigma tools,methods and the Lean enterprise philosophy, trying to eleminate waste of physical resources, effort,time with the assurance of quality in both organisational and production process.

This chapter reports related literatures to describe the methodology and implementation of six sigma. The literature review in this paper is divided into four parts viz: Basic concept, DMAIC methodology, DFSS approach, and Quality deployment.

Lean is one way in which these issues can be addressed. The basic concept of lean is “using less to do more”‖ (Institute for Healthcare Improvement, 2005). For healthcare, in particular, one can apply the principles of lean thinking to improve such processes as patient wait time, levels of staffing, and quality of care. Improvements to such processes can greatly impact the health of the community. Lean operations is all about adding value and removing waste. Lean is a management strategy that seeks to improve operational performance in terms of customer satisfaction, cost, quality, and delivery by focusing on the customer and eliminating waste, variability and inflexibility. It is based on an operational strategy for manufacturing which originated in the Japanese automotive industry, and has now been successfully applied to a range of service businesses. The use of Lean and Six Sigma can help companies position themselves for sustainable growth and profitability through improved efficiencies across the entire enterprise.

Search Strategy – The study is based on a critical comparison of lean and six sigma. The research consisted of examining Lean, Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma literature The search strategy was developed by first identifying the relevant data sources and keywords. The databases included IEEE Xplore and the Internet.

Lean practices can be beneficial for all types of organizations. The primary objective of lean is to improve organizational efficiency by eliminating waste, which in turn will lead to increased profitability. Organizational efficiency is directly linked to profitability. Often times growing businesses can find their organizations facing challenges due to the inefficiencies causing their bottom line to take a hit. According to Lancaster 2011, some of the strategies that organizations could use to improve efficiency include Lean, Just-in-time (JIT) and Six Sigma. Implementing practices such as Lean is an approach that can help organizations improve operations and increase profitability. However, lean implementation is not as easy as it sounds, it can be challenging for organizations. This paper will discuss the obstacles associated with lean implementation as well as how to overcome those obstacles.

Six Sigma has two different focuses which includes Management and technical [1]. The Management focus deals with Project metrics, identifying goals, approving/selecting projects and selecting the workforce on the project [1]. The technical focus primarily deals with minimizing the variation and improving process performance. Six Sigma predominantly depends on the management team inorder to complete the assigned projects in timely manner and to ascertain meeting specific objectives. The Business improvement involves five different stages. Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control. Six Sigma gives at most importance to detailed results at the bottomline and predict the impact on the Business environment before the Project is approved. The four significant aspects of Six Sigma are customer satisfaction, understanding of the Process, critical decision – making and Business results. Six Sigma is advantageous for companies that rely on bottom-line results and minimizing the number of defects in the Production process. Six Sigma serves as the common technique or mode in order to measure quality gains of different organizations and also to compare one