I love speaking with people who use Lean Six Sigma (LSS). Each story is different, even when I recognize the familiar benefits of LSS in their paths. I think of it like following a recipe: each person will have a different result based on ingredients, tools, and presentation, but at the end of the process, they have a satisfying product.
And that’s true from an organizational perspective, too.
Delivering on-time, high-quality products and services to increasingly discerning customers is necessary for survival. In order to grow, organizations must be nimble at problem-solving, agile at exploiting opportunities, and adept at surmounting challenges.
Like a recipe, Lean Six Sigma is a means to those ends. It helps you get the most out of your organizational ingredients with better and better outcomes.
Lean Six Sigma accelerates the potential for meaningful impact and achieving strategic goals. Continuous Improvement through LSS helps build the right culture, mindset, and infrastructure to better serve your customers and earn their loyalty.
Originally published on January 10th, 2021, this post was updated and republished on January 29th, 2024.
Who Benefits from Using Lean Six Sigma?
Whether you’re in an entry-level role, management, or CEO of an organization, LSS will help you benefit. By optimizing processes, you’ll help create lasting change, more engaged employees, and a positive impact.
- Everyone everywhere benefits. Regardless of industry, size, sector, or country of origin, all organizations and individuals can benefit from Lean Six Sigma. By using the techniques of Continuous Improvement, businesses ensure ongoing process optimization, relevance, and effectiveness.
- Customers benefit. Not only do problem solvers benefit, but the customers of each industry and function also benefit. Customers win because solving problems within a process results in fewer defects, shorter lead times, and better overall experiences for them.
Whether serving the daily special or performing key roles in your organization, streamlining processes is vital to customer satisfaction and the key to growth.
Increase Profit with Lean Six Sigma
By providing a systematic approach to Continuous Improvement, Lean Six Sigma boosts your organization’s profit by:
- Increasing capacity. Streamlining processes to their essential steps reduces the workload per unit, meaning processes provide more goods and services to more customers, thus increasing revenue.
- Producing products and services faster. Streamlining processes increases the speed of process flow while maintaining and improving quality.
If you owned a restaurant, LSS projects would help you optimize kitchen processes, streamline your menu, speed up meal preparation, serve customers more quickly, and minimize the waste of ingredients.
LSS increases revenue by enabling any organization to do more with less. You can market, sell, manufacture, and provide more of what your customers want with fewer resources.
Decrease Costs with Lean Six Sigma
In addition to increasing profit, Lean Six Sigma helps decrease costs by:
- Removing “Waste” from processes. Getting rid of activities that aren’t required to manufacture products or provide services makes it cheaper to meet customer expectations.
- Solving problems proactively. Relying less on costly inspect-and-rework cycles and switching to defect “prevention” by resolving product and service issues at the root.
Much like following a recipe, LSS is a step-by-step process. In a restaurant, you can use these steps to cut costs without unintended consequences, like employee burnout or unhappy customers.
In any industry, LSS helps with reduced costs and cutting waste, all adding up to cost savings – freeing up intellectual capital to widen the gap leaving competition behind.
Improve Efficiency with Lean Six Sigma
Efficient resource utilization is crucial for profitability. Lean Six Sigma emphasizes the efficient use of resources and process improvement plans. Common improvements include:
- Making things scalable. Creating standard processes that are easy to learn, operate, and enhance means your business grows faster.
- Reallocating valuable resources. Reclaiming resources and revenue from newly streamlined processes means more available resources to grow your business.
If I were to open a restaurant, I’d implement energy-efficient practices and data-driven decision-making. I’d standardize processes so everything in the kitchen added to the customer’s enjoyment of their meal.
Tools in LSS help eliminate errors, amplify productivity, ensure compliance, and provide an overall productive organizational environment.
Improve Effectiveness with Lean Six Sigma
The ultimate goal of Lean Six Sigma is customer satisfaction. This is done through the creation of efficient and effective processes. Process optimization in LSS leads to improved effectiveness at an organizational level. You can see this when:
- Defining customers and identifying customer requirements. Understanding who your customers are and what’s important to them enables you to concentrate your efforts where they add the most value.
- Measuring and Improving what customers care about. Measuring what customers value most helps you target improvement efforts to elevate the customer experience.
Just as a cook tastes the dish and adjusts seasoning, LSS involves measuring performance metrics and making adjustments based on data analysis for improved quality.
Achieving Operational Excellence allows your organization to deliver more products and services to a growing audience of increasingly satisfied customers.
Develop Effective People and Teams with Lean Six Sigma
Besides a product or service, one of the most critical parts of any business is its people. Restaurants rely on customer service and a well-prepared (and tasty) product, and I think this is true of any role in any business.
Lean Six Sigma helps you develop a team of engaged problem solvers by:
- Relying on employees to run improvement efforts. Team participants are proud to own process change. Involvement in problem-solving develops more effective teams that are accountable to each other and to the organization.
- Building a culture of trust. Transparency throughout all levels of a company promotes respect, improved communication, and a shared understanding of how each person drives organizational success.
People provide innovation, leadership, and adaptability. Give back to them through paths of career advancement, higher salary expectations, and increased leadership opportunities. In doing this, you’ll foster higher employee satisfaction leading to better employee retention.
By investing in your organization’s workforce, you’re not just helping them, you’re building a team.
Six Sigma Benefits: The Bottom Line
Using Lean Six Sigma is a recipe for success. Whether for a restaurant, an insurance office, or a hospital, LSS can be applied across industries to help find the best way to realize your business’s vision and train your team.
LSS helps you achieve this in many ways, such as:
- Streamlining processes for improved customer experience
- Efficient process flows for higher bottom-line results.
- Defect prevention for reduced costs and waste.
- Standardized processes allow flexibility when challenges arise.
- Decreasing lead times increases capacity and profitability.
- Engaged employees increase morale and help accelerate individual growth.
Find out more about how Lean Six Sigma can benefit you! The sooner you start your journey, the sooner you can achieve your organizational goals and improve your customer experience. Try the free training for you or your team now!
