Hi, I'm Ray Sheen, let's start our program on Lean Six Sigma with a review
of the roots of this methodology.
If you plan on sitting for a Lean Six Sigma Belt exam,
you can expect several questions concerning the history of Lean Six Sigma.
During the 20th century, a revolution in industrial quality took place,
initially it was led by gurus such as Shewhart.
In the early part of the century followed by others in both
the United States and Japan.
Some of the best known were Deming, Juran, Ishikawa, Taguchi, Crosby, and Shingo.
Each provided a valuable contribution and
each emphasized a different aspect of process improvement.
By the 1980s, we'd moved from having people in the quality department following
Gurus to creating businesswide process improvement methodologies.
The first of these to gain wide acceptance was Total Quality Management,
TQM gave us a top-down framework, but little bottom-up activity.
So continuous improvement programs like Kaizen and PDCA, came to the forefront,
these emphasized teamwork and action but relied on analysis.
At the same time, many companies were starting to use a discipline problem
solving methodology, many of these had been created internally or by consultants.
One of the best known programs delivered by consultants was Kepner Tregoe.
And one of the best known internal programs was Ford's Eight Discipline or
8D process.
Governments started getting involved sponsoring national quality awards
like the Deming Prize in Japan and Malcolm Baldrige award in the United States.
But there was still lots of confusion as to what constituted best practices.
So the International Standard Organization jumped in
with ISO 9000 which was widely adopted in the late 1990s.
Also in the '90s, the Lean Manufacturing approach gained recognition,
I'll talk more about that in a minute.
And Six Sigma was introduced by Motorola. Variations of these came into existence
in the beginning of the 21st century including design for
Six Sigma and Lean Sigma.
Well since this is a program on Lean Six Sigma,
I want to explore the roots of both of those in a little more detail.
Six Sigma can trace it's roots all the way back to the early 1800s and Charles Gauss.
Who established many of the fundamental statistical analysis principles, including
the normal distribution or as it's commonly called, the bell shaped curve.
Move forward 100 years and professor Shewhart of Princeton created the concept
to statistical process control.
And applied it to the several branches of the US government.
In the mid 1980s, Bob Smith at Motorola expanded on that concept and
developed the Six Sigma program.
Which Bob Galvin, the Motorola CEO spread throughout the company,
Motorola certified the first black belt in 1991.
The program was so successful that it was adopted into Allied Signal and
then General Electric, where it received worldwide notice and acclaim.
By 2000, Six Sigma was an industry with university programs,
consultants, training programs, and certifying bodies.
So let's now look at the roots of Lean. Process improvement of
manufacture processes took a giant step forward in the early 1800s.
When Eli Whitney developed designs with interchangeable parts,
well that improved the material side of manufacturing processing.
And then Frederick Winslow Taylor and
Frank Gilbreath focused on the improvement of labor activities.
That brings us to Henry Ford and the production line in manufacturing,
a process focused approach.
Following World War II, Toyota implemented a total production system that optimized
manufacturing flow and eventually evolved into Lean manufacturing.
In the early 1990s, Womack, Jones, and Roos documented the Toyota approach and
disseminated the Lean concept throughout the world.
Lean seems to have run its course as a management approach.
When it was married with Six Sigma at the beginning of 21st century,
and is now an integral part of Lean Six Sigma.
As we look at all the improvement approaches from the gurus through to
Lean Six Sigma, there are four common themes that come out.
Some approaches emphasize one over the other, Lean Six Sigma emphasizes all four.
These are process focussed, empowered teams, customer focus and data analysis.
Process focus means that the team follows a structured process
through a sequence of steps.
They can trust the process to guide them to an improvement.
People focus means that an empowered cross-functional team of subject
matter experts do the process improvement activities, not just outside consultants.
Customer focus means that the improvement is on a process output that is
important to the customers, either an internal or external customer.
And project success is measured by the amount of impact on the customer.
Finally, the data analysis focus means that the improvement activities rely
on data to determine the problem and the solution, not just gut feel.
In particular, statistical data is used and of course,
Lean Six Sigma embraces all of these.
Let me wrap up this module with a few comments about some of the difficulties
with the earlier process improvement programs.
And how Lean Six Sigma is attempting to overcome these.
The programs with a rigid methodology became mired in bureaucracy.
And projects often stalled as teams struggled
to complete activities that did not apply to their project.
Lean Six Sigma has a structure, but within that structure the team can choose
the tools or techniques that best fit the circumstances.
Principle based methodologies were often short on tools so
people didn't know how to implement them.
And tool-based methodologies would get stuck when teams
tried to use a tool that didn't fit the problem.
Lean Six Sigma provides principles for guidance and a toolbox of tools
that the teams can choose from based upon their circumstances.
Some of the data driven methodologies did not provide enough guidance
on how to collect and validate their data.
Lean Six Sigma uses both quality and process data so
there are many data sources.
Some methodologies have left the teams to make all their own decisions
for improvement.
And the teams would come up with solutions that were not aligned with organizational
strategy.
The Lean Six Sigma tollgate structure ensures that teams can't get
too far out of alignment, yet doesn't overcontrol their daily activities.
Finally, some methodologies ignored the project management aspect, so
projects became very late, overrun, and out of control.
Lean Six Sigma does include project management deliverables
in the methodology.
So that's some history and background on Lean Six Sigma, now let's dig in and
find out how it really works.