Page 216 - Lean six sigma demystified

194 Lean Six Sigma DemystifieD

stuff is sucking up time and resources that could be dedicated to improving your
business!

Invisible Low-Hanging Fruit

When I first got into the quality improvement movement in 1990, our Florida
Power and Light consultants always spoke about low-hanging fruit just waiting
to be plucked. Two years later and tens of thousands of staff hours later, we still
hadn’t found any low-hanging fruit.
In any company, if there really is low-hanging fruit, it’s usually visible from
everywhere from the factory floor to the management conference room. When
it’s that visible, anyone can pluck it with a little common sense and a bit of trial
and error.
That’s why in most companies there is no visible low-hanging fruit. Some-
body has already plucked it! And this is what stops most leaders from even
considering the tools of Six Sigma: they can’t see any more fruit to be picked.
But in company after company, my own included, I have found orchards filled
with low-hanging, invisible fruit. You just can’t see it with the naked eye.
You can, however, discern it through the magnifying lens of control charts
and Pareto charts. They make the seemingly invisible, visible. They are the micro-
scopes, the MRIs, the EKGs of business diagnosis.
When Louis Pasteur said that there were tiny bugs in air and in the water,
everyone thought he was crazy because they weren’t visible to the naked eye.
Everyone thought it was just an “ill wind” that made people sick.
In today’s tough economic times, everyone laments about how hard it is.
How an “ill wind” has blown through their business, their industry, and their

economy. But have they considered using the modern tools of business medi-
cine to root out the infectious agents in their business? Have they taken the
time to look for the invisible low-hanging fruit in their business? I doubt it.
Someone sent me an email today that said that even in the poorest run com-
panies, he’d had no luck finding the low-hanging fruit. But in every company
I’ve ever worked with, I’ve found millions of dollars just waiting to be retrieved
from the caldrons of defects and delay. Are you looking for the obvious? Or
investigating the invisible?
The low-hanging fruit is always invisible to the naked eye. Turn the magnifying
and illuminating tools of Six Sigma on your most difficult operational problems,
and stare into the depths of the unknown, the unfamiliar. You’ll invariably find
bushels of bucks, just waiting for a vigilant harvester.