“Improvement usually means doing something that we have never done before.” – Shigeo Shingo
Have you ever felt anxiety at work, within your business or professional career❓
Do you want to get somewhere new but don’t know-how❓
This new place could be can be a promotion, growing a new business, expanding an existing business, growing a new organization, or just becoming an Influencer in your industry. These examples are considered improvements. But there are times that these improvements can be overwhelming and cause anxiety. There is a way to overcome these feelings of being overwhelmed and anxious by taking steps to get there.
The improvements we are doing is something that we have never done before.
Continuous Improvement can help us get there—one step at a time. But the most important thing to remember is that we need to start instead of waiting!
Here’s a simple way to start to climb the mountain of Continuous Improvement:
1️⃣Define your goal or problem
2️⃣Plan out your attack. Brainstorm
3️⃣Do your plans of attack
4️⃣Revise – Did you plan work?
✔️ If yes, continue what you are doing.
✔️ If no, relook at your goal or problem. Is your plan getting there? If not, revise it!
5️⃣Revise – Did you plan work?
✔️If yes, continue what you are doing.
✔️If no, relook at your goal or problem. Is your plan getting there? If not, revise it!
6️⃣You reach success!
One critical thought is to remember that you need to measure your success for you, your employees, your customers, and your business.
How are you going to Improve Continuously❓
Let me know your thoughts below.
If you want to learn more about how you can Continuously Improve,let’s talk. I can help through the steps through coaching or consulting.
After I wrote my article on Lean Six Sigma benefits for Small to Medium Businesses, I thought it would be beneficial to write about the hard facts with Lean Six Sigma. It is essential to understand the ROI and value Lean Six Sigma brings, regardless if you hire a consultant or implement a program within your own company.
Before diving into the numbers, we should recap some of the benefits of Lean Six Sigma.
Hard Benefits
The hard benefits are generally tangible things, for example:
Reducing processing cost
Increasing revenue
Improving cash flow
Eliminating the need for capital expenditure
Faster quote to cash
Reduce the need to hire additional employees
Reducing operating costs
Reduce the need for extra inventory
Reducing machine operating time
Reducing overtime hours
Reducing cycle time to deliver the service or creating the product
Soft Benefits
LSS soft benefits do not have the same tangible effect as hard benefits. However, these soft benefits are beneficial for the business. Examples of soft benefits are:
Customer focus
The focal point becomes the customer instead of the company
Happy customers usually lead to more revenue
A good and bad review can make or break a business
Improved employee morale
Happy employees enjoy coming to work every day
Happy employees treat customers and other employees with respect
Unhappy employees can result in high turnover and loss of talent
Improved employee effectiveness
Employees perform better when they are happy
Better performance means satisfied customers
Leading by fact and alignment
LSS provides a way for owners, leaders, and managers to manage the company based on facts
LSS eliminates the need for guessing
LSS provides critical measurements for a business to define success
What is the value of Lean Six Sigma?
So what does all of this mean in the terms ROI and the bottom line? Let’s dive into the numbers I compiled from some research and my success.
The numbers below I gathered through my research:
Allied Signal – Over the past 12 years, cost savings over $800 M
US Army – Cost savings around $2B in 2019
UCSD Medical Center – $ 4M in savings
Ford Motor Company – $300M in savings
Agilent Technologies – $ 2B in streamlining their Supply Chain
Within my 12-year career in Lean Six Sigma, I have saved companies ~$14 M + in revenue and savings. Some individual examples of my successes are:
Reduce the time and improve the quality to post a job for external recruiting from 1 month to 4 days –
~$800K in savings
Improved employee morale
Improved quality of client reports and services
$ 2M in revenue
Enhanced client relationships and employee morale
Improvement of two products cycle time and quality
$3.5 M in operating cost savings and revenue retention
Improved employee morale and customer satisfaction
Improvement in delivery cycle time for an international product
Improved employee morale and customer satisfaction
$5M in increased revenue and operating cost savings
Improved sales cycle time and quality
~$1.5 M in revenue
Improved Sales employee morale
Improved communication with potential and new clients
What does this all mean?
Lean Six Sigma is beneficial to any business, no matter the size or industry. The numbers above are only scratching the surface. Just based on these numbers, it is easy to see the ROI on Lean Six Sigma and how it affects a business’ bottom line.
If we look past the hard numbers, we can also see how Lean Six Sigma does have soft benefits. Just the increase in customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and employee satisfaction provides better brand awareness and improved market share. These soft savings contribute to the overall bottom line.
Everything adds up to help create a successful business. Any type of business, regardless of size or industry, can benefit from Lean Six Sigma to help them grow and become successful.
Have you or your company utilized Lean Six Sigma? What are some of the benefits that you have seen from using Lean Six Sigma?
If you want o use Lean Six Sigma within your business, Contact Me.
This morning I realized that I’m able to have a latte at home by merely using my Nutribullet to froth my soy milk and heat it in the microwave.
While it’s not as fancy as a coffee house latte, I can still enjoy the latte in my home without a fancy coffee machine or milk frother.
This simple concept can be applied to business. As I grow my own business, I try not to listen to all the fancy new things out there or stories about how people became overnight successes. What I do know what works are the concepts I learned a long time ago through Lean Six Sigma. The simple tools to improve or create business processes with my own business do work. After my processes become standard, then I can apply the automation.
If your business is struggling or you do not know how to grow, think about your business process. Business processes range from marketing to sales, all the way to operations. Are these processes serving your customers or clients? Are these processes providing a great customer experience? Without your customers and clients being happy, you will not be able to become successful.
What are some ways you can improve your business to help your customers and clients?
Over the past few weeks, I had the pleasure of working with a unique small business that has seen tremendous growth in the past few years. This business has an exciting niche that needs their expertise. What was even more interesting about this business is that they had some excellent core values and exceptional people that work there. The business owners recognized that they are growing faster than they anticipated and are experiencing growing pains. They knew they needed help in order to get to the NEXT LEVEL! This is one of the many reasons why this business realized that they can use Lean Six Sigma (LSS) to help get them to the next level.
This business is a perfect example of how small to medium businesses (SMB) do need some type of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) to help them through the growing pains so they can progress to the next level. However, these SMBs may feel overwhelmed, alone, and they are on a downward spiral. But how can LSS help? There are several different things that these businesses can do that doesn’t require a separate LSS, Quality Improvement, or Business Process Improvement organization.
Business Process
Let’s first talk about business processes. Most SMBs do have processes, but these processes are not scalable for them to grow correctly. By not having the right processes in place, the following problems start to appear:
Business owners and leadership are unsure how the business is genuinely performing
The client is starting to complain, especially the more prominent clients
While revenue grows, so does cost
Confusion or lack of transparency between all groups within the business
Different types of work are not in the right place
People’s talents are underutilized, or they are not performing because they are in the wrong position
Everything has become inefficient through the organization
Business owners or leadership are lacking direction and leadership growth
How to apply Lean Six Sigma
There are several different things that these businesses can do that does not require a separate LSS organization. Below are a few small and quick ways to implement this into the company. Remember the key is to start small and then build upon these steps.
By teaching Lean to the Store Operators, this allows Chick-Fila employees to incorporate the different aspects to Lean throughout the entire organization
Identify the processes that need improvement
Two ways to identify the problem processes:
Use the KPS that was created to determine what parts of the businesses are doing poorly
Use the Lean Wastes to identify the areas that need to improve
Involve everyone within the entire company along this journey
This requires the buy-in on all levels to ensure success
Once everyone starts to be involved, I’ve seen businesses and organizations move beyond using the simple tools to becoming a successful business that grows year after year
Do you find the ideas listed in this article helpful? What are some of your ideas to implement the ideas from this article within your business?
If you would like to learn how I can help you grow with Contact me to see how we can work together.
Lean Six Sigma Benefits for Small to Medium Businesses
During several discussions over the past few weeks, I get asked: “how can Lean Six Sigma (LSS) be applied to various industries and sizes of businesses.” Through these discussions, I hear several different arguments about how to use or not to use LSS to small to medium companies or governmental sectors. After much thought, I decided to develop a series of articles on the benefits and application of LSS within small to medium companies and governmental agencies.
Let’s first start with what is the definition of small to medium businesses and the Lean Six Sigma benefits for small to medium businesses.
Through my research, I did not find one single definition for small or medium businesses. Depending on whom you talk to or article, there are several definitions. It depends on the industry and type of business that you have. There is not one single metric that defines what a small to medium business is. However, I was able to great the following list of what a small to medium business might mean:
Privately own in either of the following capacities:
Corporations
Partnerships
Sole proprietorships
Employee size
Small business – fewer than 100 employees
Medium business – 100 to 999 employees
Annual revenue
Small business – less than $50 M in annual
Medium business – more $50 M to less than $1 B
I gathered these factors from the following websites:
After reading the article, Think Small with Six Sigma from SPIE, I learned that roughly 2/3 of all employees in Europe and nearly half of all US Employees work for small to medium businesses. That is a vast workforce population. Larger companies are using small to medium businesses more and more. These businesses are representing up to as much as 75% to 80% off the entire business processes. More substantial corporations that use Lean Six Sigma, Lean, or Six Sigma are asking their small to medium business partners to implement some quality program to ensure that their end customers experience is top-notch regardless of who is serving them.
Small to Medium Business Processes
Regardless of what type of business or industry that, you are in, there is a business process for anything. Irrespective of the business process has been formally mapped out, or if SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) exists or not. Each business and employee follow some type of process. Examples of high-level business processes are:
Customer Service- regardless in a call center or receptionist
Payroll
Billing customers for services or products
Accounting processes
Sales processes irrespective the size of the company
Human Resources processes
Delivering the service
Data Analytics
Creating reports
Finance processes
IT processes
Product development process or Lifecycle process
However, one of the biggest things that I’ve seen within any business is that leaders and employees are unsure what the process is. One employee may know what they need to do, but they are unsure what the upstream or downstream employee is doing. They are unaware that mistakes or issues are occurring. Edwards Demming put it best “ If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
When I hear business leaders or owners talk about the issues within their business, I immediately know that they do not understand what their business processes are. They are unsure how to fix them. The following are the common complaints that keep business leaders and owners up at night :
My customers are complaining about the quality of the service
We do not seem to move fast enough to satisfy our customers
Our products are not meeting customer specifications
We are unable to keep up with customer demand
We are losing our customers to our competitors
We are losing revenue even though we have tried to fixed things
My employees are always complaining
My employees are always complaining about one another
Our business is growing, but we can’t keep up with the growth
Lean Six Sigma Benefits for Small to Medium Businesses
Before diving into how to apply LSS within small to medium businesses, we need to touch upon what are the benefits of using it. LSS has soft and hard benefits. The hard benefits are generally tangible things, for example:
Reducing processing cost
Increasing revenue
Improving cash flow
Eliminating the need for capital expenditure
Faster quote to cash
Reduce the need to hire additional employees
Reducing operating costs
Reduce the need for extra inventory
Reducing machine operating time
Reducing overtime hours
Reducing cycle time to deliver the service or creating the product
LSS soft benefits do not have the same tangible effect as hard benefits. However, these soft benefits are beneficial for the business. Examples of soft benefits are:
Customer focus
The focal point becomes the customer instead of the company
Happy customers usually lead to more revenue
A good and bad review can make or break a business
Improved employee morale
Happy employees enjoy coming to work every day
Happy employees treat customers and other employees with respect
Unhappy employees can result in high turnover and loss of talent
Improved employee effectiveness
Employees perform better when they are happy
Better performance means satisfied customers
Leading by fact and alignment
LSS provides a way for owners, leaders, and managers to manage the company based on facts
LSS eliminates the need for guessing
LSS provides critical measurements for a business to define success
Can you think of any other benefits? What are your thoughts on applying LSS to small to medium businesses?
In my next article, I’ll go over how to apply Lean Six Sigma within small to medium businesses.
If you want to learn how to use Lean Six Sigma within your business, Contact Me
If you ever organized your laptop, workspace, bedroom, closet, laundry, or garage, you utilized Lean Six Sigma 5S without realizing it. 5S is a well-known Lean organizational method used throughout all industries. 5S can be used in the workplace and within your everyday life.
Examples of 5S
5S is an organzaitonal method that uses a list of five Japanese words:
Seiri – Sort
Seiton – Set in Order
Seiso – Shine
Seiketsu – Standarize
Shitsuke – Sustain
What is 5S?
5S = Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain
Originated and developed from Japan – Toyota Management System
A structured approach to establishing and maintaining a well-organized workplace
It can be used at home to organize kitchens, closets, garages, etc.
Why use it?
Work
Stops the causes of errors and defects
Prevents Problems
Provides a clean and organized work area
Home
Clean and tidy house (no clutter)
No wasted energy on searching and retrieving things
No money spent on extra storage
How to use 5S
Step 1 – Sort
Eliminate everything that is not necessary
Get rid of :
Unused appliances, tools, books, & medications
Broken things
Separate files into necessary and unnecessary
Create categories to put the required data and things into
Step 2 – Straighten/Set in order
Find items easier
Arrange things in a manner that is easy to find things
Put files into file folders
Put items in the same location in the refrigerator
Put labels onto containers
Keep an organized closet
Step 3- Shine/Sanitize
Clean, tidy, organize
Tidy up at the end of each day and week
After a DIY project, always leave the workplace tidy
Fold and put laundry away right away
Clean the kitchen as you cook
Step 4 – Standardize
Define repeatable routines
Always clean your house in the same room order
Create a checklist that helps place everything in the right place
Establish a standard daily/weekly schedule for home & work
Use the same type of hangers for your clothing
Step 5 – Sustain
Maintain and review your routines
Review your to-do lists
Did you accomplish everything in time and with the expected results?
Lean Six Sigma is a practice that combines two popular methodologies of Lean and Six Sigma. As a result of combining Lean and Six Sigma Tools, you get strong results that improve business profits, operating efficiency, and most importantly customer satisfaction.
Before we dig into Lean Six Sigma, we must first answer the questions:
What is Lean?
What is Six Sigma?
Then we can answer the question, what is Lean Six Sigma?
What is Lean?
When you think about Toyota vehicles, what comes to mind?
You might have come up with:
Long-lasting
Affordable
Reliable
High quality for the money
When I was a kid, you would buy a Toyota car over an American car if you wanted something that was going to last a long time. As a result, you were buying the Toyota Production System – a Lean concept. Lean has come together after many years of study and theories from Henry Ford, Toyota Production System, Just-In-Time, Eli Whitney, Edward Demming, and other great thinkers.
Lean is a methodology the reduces or eliminates waste out of a process. As a result of removing waste, the only thing that is left is the value add (VA) steps. You now have a high-quality process that produces higher customer satisfaction rates. In simple terms, waste is anything that does not add value to a product or service. As a customer, you do not want to pay for the waste. It raises costs! In addition to higher customer satisfaction rates, Lean helps with:
Reducing cycle time (the amount of time takes to produce a product or service)
Creating a high-quality product with little to no defects
Reducing overhead or inventory
While Lean wants to remove the waste, I always felt that the customer was another critical aspect. The customer is vital in any industry and should still be the forefront of what we do.
The “customer” is throughout the five principles of Lean:
My first introduction to Six Sigma methodology was during my MBA. I knew it was a systematic data-driven methodology. However, I never saw Six Sigma in action, until I went through AT&T’s Six Sigma program.
Did you know that Motorola used Six Sigma back in the 1980s?
Back in 1984, Bill Smith introduced Six Sigma within Motorola to compete with Lean. For example, throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Six Sigma was heavily used in manufacturing. Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, and other great thinkers developed Six Sigma.
Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach to process improvement. Six Sigma makes things better, faster, and at a lower cost. Therefore, it cuts process variation and enhances process control.
There are two main frameworks for Six Sigma:
DMAIC – Fix broken processes and products
DMADV – Create new methods and products
DMAIC
DMAIC is an acronym for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. It provides a roadmap to improve and give stability to existing services, products, or processes.
DMADV is an acronym for Define, Measure, Analyze, and Design. By using this roadmap, you can create a new service, product, or process. Sometimes things are too broken; it’s better to start fresh.
You get a powerful method that combines powerful tools that produce quality products, services, or processes. Therefore you get highly satisfied customers, impactful savings, and higher revenue.
When I started down my journey into the Lean Six Sigma world as a Black Belt, I only used Six Sigma. As my career grew, I began to learn Lean and began to join both in my projects and programs. After that, I started to see more significant results.
Overall Lean and Six Sigma do have the same goal, but each discipline identifies roots causes of waste differently. For example, Lean thinks waste comes from the non-value added steps while Six Sigma thinks waste comes from variation. While both methodologies are right, when you combine them you get something even more powerful!
When I practice Lean Six Sigma, I review what is going on to find the approach that I’m going to take. Consequently, there are always two sides to every story. In other words, never judge a book by its cover.
Lean Six Sigma Examples
The Lean Six Sigma Examples I usually come across are the following:
If detailed data does not exist, I’ll take a Lean approach to makes things effective and efficient. With waste eliminated, I’ll put a data system into place. Then I’ll use the observations to take a Six Sigma statistical approach to enhance things further.
If detailed data is present, I start with a Six Sigma approach and then bring in Lean. This approach is unique because I can use Lean Six Sigma right away instead of using each method separately.
With the creation of something new, I approach this by using DMADV and Lean together. Both approaches generate creativity and innovation.
Lean Sigma produces successful exciting outcomes!
How can you use Lean Six Sigma?
Can you think of ways to use it within your business?
In the coming weeks, there will be blog posts about Lean Six Sigma in more detail and how to use it. If you don’t have time to wait,Contact Me to see how I can help you now.
Welcome to Lauren Hisey Consulting !!! I wanted to personally welcome you my new business. Starting a new venture has always been a dream of mine. Check back in the next few days learn more about my business and Lean Six Sigma !
