Six Sigma Vs Lean.

Lean Six Sigma encompasses many common features of Lean and Six Sigma, such as an emphasis on customer satisfaction, a culture of continuous improvement, the search for root causes, and comprehensive employee involvement. In each case, a high degree of training and education takes place, from upper management to the shop floor. [5]

Goh, T.N. (2002), “A strategic assessment of six sigma”, Quality Reliability Engineering International, Vol. 18 No. 5, pp.

In order to accomplish this vision, Ford decided it would be in their best interest to use Six Sigma. According to google, “Lean six sigma can be defined as a management methodology that relies on a collaborative team effort to improve performance by systematically removing waste.” Six sigma was originally created by Bill Smith and Bob Galvin of Motorola in 1986. The idea is to improve quality so that the number of total defects is reduced to the point where they are statistically insignificant; and means that an error will occur only 3.4 times per million observations.

Bill Smith first formulated the particulars of the methodology at Motorola in 1986. Six Sigma was heavily inspired by six preceding decades of quality improvement methodologies such as quality control, TQM, and Zero Defects, based on the work of pioneers such as Shewhart, Deming, Juran, Ishikawa, Taguchi and others.

Six sigma and lean system has the same way of approaching but uses different technology to achieve the goal. The both procedure lives up to expectations for to dispense with waste and expand the productivity of the procedure and convey the zero defect items. Recognizable of primary cause of waste is the fundamental distinction between lean and six sigma. lean innovation says that waste originates from undesirable steps in the production process which don 't add the value of the final product while six sigma says that waste is a direct result of variety of diverse procedures.

We can also make comparisons between Six Sigma and the different Japanese methodologies and draw a number of conclusions...

The word is a factual term that measures how far a given procedure goes astray from flawlessness. Six Sigma is named after the procedure that has six standard deviations on every side of the detail window. It is a trained, information driven methodology and technique for taking out imperfections. The focal thought behind Six Sigma is that on the off chance that you can quantify what number of "imperfections" you have in a procedure, you can methodicallly make sense of how to dispense with them and get as near to "zero deformities" as would be prudent.

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 Six Sigma should be seen as an integrated framework now to initiate the change in culture and operations, leading to business and operations improvements. Organizations should try to become lean as much as possible and should leave a space for Six Sigma methodologies and should move forward to other philosophies such as agility and innovations. Every lean or Six sigma tool is not suitable for each company but most suitable tools and techniques should be identified and implemented in Lean Six Sigma frame work to get the competitive position in the

In general, deKoning et al (2006) propose that combining Lean with Six Sigma is ideal; they complement each other by Lean having a total system approach, while Six Sigma contributes with a general problem solving framework and organizational structure. A George (2003) state that the two methodologies are often considered as rivaling, but argues that a merger between Lean and Six Sigma is needed due to the fact that Lean does not provide statistical control to a process and Six Sigma cannot radically improve process speed. Andersson, et al., (2006) similarly state that the concepts are complementary and that they could be used one by one or combined. The following quote from Wedgewood (2006) describes quite well the difference between the two strategies, as well as motivation for combining them:

Lean and Six Sigma will be analyzed taking into consideration the principles and implications underlying them, they benefits that these methodologies bring to businesses, as well as the most popular tools used by the companies. Further on, in the case study I will concentrate on the Hospitality Industry. I will take each large field it includes and investigate how Lean Six Sigma is or could be applied in order to generate as much benefits as possible: to improve customers’ experiences, get rid of the large amounts of waste and defects identified once they started the projects and of which managers are usually not really aware of, and, of course, reduce costs and increase

The idea is to use different methods to tackle different issues so as not to get the Six-Sigma resources spread over too many projects. At first instance, new project entries are reviewed and asked: “Do we need Six-Sigma for this project?”. If the answer is “no” then a simpler methodology is used.

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. Many organizations are implementing Six Sigma in India. ICICI, Larsen & Toubro, Mahindra & Mahindra, Tata motors, HDFC are some major organizations implementing Six Sigma. 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.

After invention of Six Sigma in Motorola till 1995, in literature Six Sigma was considered as statistical tool but after 1995 when GE adopted Six Sigma, it became a business strategy and management approach. Thus we can make pre 1995 and post 1995 till 2001 two era of Six Sigma literature having two different approaches, Pre 1995- A Quality and Statistical approach and Post 1995-

Six Sigma is a quality program stressing the need for quantitative quality standards that focuses on improving the product for the customer, and that this in turn, will improve quality and reduce costs. Introduced by engineer Bill Smith at Motorola in 1986, Six Sigma is now widely used throughout the manufacturing industry. In statistics, sigma is the notation for the standard deviation, which is related to variation. The ultimate goal of Six Sigma is to reduce variation in a process in order to reduce defects caused by a process and defects seen by customers. Six Sigma is broken up into two disciplines for manufacturing, DMAIC and DMADV. DMAIC is used to continuously improve existing processes, while DMADV is