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28 Lean Six Sigma DemystifieD

Once you’ve identified, improved, and sustained a new level of performance
in one area of your business, something else will become more vital to your
personal and professional evolution.
How will you know what to focus on next? Return to your measurements.
What’s next?

• Delay?

• Defects?
• Deviation?

Lean Six Sigma Demystified

Lean Six Sigma will focus your improvement efforts to drive dramatic
improvements in speed, quality, and profitability. The methods and tools of
Lean will help drive dramatic improvements in speed and productivity. The
methods and tools of Six Sigma will help drive radical reductions in defects
and deviation that will improve productivity and profitability. Regardless of
the acronyms used or the number of steps, Lean Six Sigma follows a universal
improvement process: Focus, Improve, Sustain, and Honor (FISH). There are
a handful of tools that you will need for each of these steps to move from
three to five sigma. To rise to Six Sigma, you will need some more robust
tools, but you won’t be ready for their rigor until you’ve embraced and mas-
tered the basic tools.
There are some additional methods and tools that you can use to design
innovative products and processes from scratch. These are called Design for

Lean Six Sigma (DfLSS or DFSS).
Although most books start you on the path toward total domination of the
corporate culture and business processes, I’d like you to start by piloting some
focused improvement projects involving Lean and Six Sigma. As you begin to
master the improvement processes, then, and only then, would I like you to
consider expanding the scope to include more people and projects to the point
that Lean Six Sigma becomes a way of doing business, not just a program of the
month or the pet project of a CEO.
The methods and tools are the easy part; changing culture is hard. When you
start by creating successful projects and let the corporate grapevine sell Lean
Six Sigma for you, it will be easy to change the culture, because the culture will
adopt and adapt Lean Six Sigma on its own. When you start by trying to force