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Lean Six Sigma for Non-Manufacturing Environments

Is it applicable?

There is a misconception that Lean Six Sigma is only applicable in high volume manufacturing environments and not in low volume, office or service environments. I have even heard a well known government business advisory service give this advice to a company.

Well I am pleased to tell you that Lean Six Sigma is just as applicable in transactional and pure service businesses. However, some of the tools and techniques need adapting to suit.

It is true that both Lean and Six Sigma were invented and developed in manufacturing environments; Lean was invented by Toyota and Six Sigma at Motorola. The integration and evolution over the last 10 years or so of the best two improvement techniques in the world into Lean Six Sigma has now produced a general tool that is applicable to any process. In fact GE, the world’s largest company, rose to stardom in the 1990’s under Jack Welch by applying Six Sigma throughout all their processes.

I will concede, however that much of the literature and the language of Lean Six Sigma come from manufacturing and as such can alienate other businesses, particularly if practitioners are not experienced enough to translate it to their own processes and problems.

The more progressive Lean Six Sigma consultancies and practitioners are adapting the tools and techniques to suit the language and examples of different organisations. Examples being; the health service, banking, retail, office environments, sales and innovation.

This is why SigmaPro have brought out a version of their popular Green Belt Foundation training course written with non-manufacturing in mind. The course uses the same proven structure of DMAIC for running improvement projects and uses language and examples from a wide range of transactional, service and office environments.

A little while ago, I wrote an article on The 4 Deadly Office Wastes where the definition and examples of waste was translated for office environments.

By the way, the four deadly office wastes are:

1. Information waste
2. Process waste
3. Physical waste
4. People waste

and examples of the 7 classic process wastes translated into an office environment are:

• Transport

Handoffs, taking things to others

• Inventory

A task waiting to be started

• Motion

Walking, rerouting information

• Waiting

Delays, queues

• Over production

Unnecessary or unused information

• Over processing

Unnecessary steps, variations

• Defects

Incomplete information, retyping

 

From this you can see that Lean Six Sigma translates to office and transactional processes very easily. Processes such as vendor payment, customer returns, call centres and sales order processing have many parallels with manufacturing, where each transaction is seen as a product.

One of the case studies in SigmaPro’s new Green Belt Foundation course relates to a specialist online book selling business, where typical problems of unclear processes, batching and queuing and quality errors lead to chaos. Students of the course resolve these issues as part of the learning experience.

Other examples and exercises on the course are drawn from the wind power industry, website SEO optimisation, service returns, call centre

customer satisfaction and an environmental research study.

Powerful tools such as value stream mapping, voice of customer, capability analysis, regression and design of experiments (DOE) are all equally applicable to service and transactional processes alike. We have even devised a fun DOE exercise based on two teams; one acting as ‘customers’ and the other as ‘suppliers’, the problem to be experimented upon can be anything that the teams agree upon. Examples so far have been customer satisfaction in a call centre, maximising readership of a magazine, hospital operating theatre turnaround times and charity collection optimisation.

Lean Six Sigma is applicable to office, service and general transactional based businesses as well as manufacturing. However, leaving trainees and practitioners to interpret the language and applications just raises barriers to its use. A well specified and thought out course specifically for non-manufacturing organisations will help the adoption of the world’s best improvement tool – Lean Six Sigma.

SigmaPro have just released an office, service and transactional based Green Belt Foundation course running over five consecutive days. This will equip delegates with the ability to run foundation level improvement projects and more proactively support other projects.

 

Contact SigmaPro to find out about our comprehensive training and support programmes.

 

Author Name - David Cowburn (MBB, Lean Six Sigma)

David has 25 years of running companies to Managing Director level and is experienced in utilising Lean Six Sigma in a wide variety of businesses including, manufacturing, process industry, service, and administrative.

In a people based hands-on style, he works and trains at all levels in an organisation from Board to shop floor to bring about rapid measurable step changes in performance.

David was originally trained in the Toyota Production System and has since developed a high level blend of Lean and Six Sigma philosophies and tools through working with businesses all around the World.