There have been suggestions that the improvements made through a Lean Six Sigma deployment are not sustainable. While results have been largely positive, and companies who use it for operations improvements have reported substantial savings, the gains achieved have only been for the short-term and have no sustainability. The good side of it is that in such deployments, there usually is a pool of highly trained and skilled statistical problem solvers - the Black Belts - who are able to ferret out root causes of problems to effect improvements and change. There is also a supposed network of trained Green Belts to support the Black Belt projects.
On the other side of the spectrum, is the Toyota Production System or any variants of it. While the name may be misleading, it is essentially a set of philosophies which sets the culture for an organization to continuously improve (kaizen). A company who solely subscribes to the use of TPS methodologies would probably have a system and culture of involving everyone in the organization in waste elimination and problem-solving. It is by this very nature that results and improvements will be more sustainable.
It is in the author's view that perhaps there are the good things of both Lean Six Sigma and TPS that can be brought together. Neither deployment is inferior than the other. It all depends on the deployment context and organizational culture. The strength of the Lean Six Sigma program lies in the rigourous statistical reasonings used, while the strength of TPS lies in the continuous improvement culture it preaches. Just as there are both hardwares and softwares in computer systems, an organizational excellence system would also benefit from both a hardware (Lean Six Sigma) and a software (TPS).
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3 comments:
There is a lot of debate about the relationship between TPS, Lean and Six Sigma.
Accordind to Jim Womac, founder and president of the Lean Enterprise Institute, all the above methods try to achieve the same thing: The perfect value stream.
If you want to know more on this read Jim Womack's E-letters
"Jim Womack on how lean compares with Six Sigma, Re-engineering, TOC, TPM, etc., etc." posted on Jul 14, 2003 in the Lean Enterprise institute community-archive section
Agree with assessment that TPM success is measured by the change in the culture and being able to maintain that change.
My frustrated is still alive that supportive groups are allowing things to back slide. This behavior in my opinion comes from the fear accountability as some have never been before been linked to the manufacturing process
Nice post. I am a lean practitioner myself and agree with you – we should collect failed stories so that we can get an understanding of what not to do.lean six sigma
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