If any of the following sounds like your organisation, Lean Six Sigma is very likely a sensible route to explore further. It is most effective against recurring problems that hit performance, customer experience, employee satisfaction or cost:

• Excessive rework and avoidable errors.
• Long lead times and process bottlenecks.
• Customer complaints and inconsistent service.
• Quality issues that keep recurring.
• Rising or unpredictable operating costs.
• Too hard/frustrating to get things done.

Most organisations have these kinds of problems. What they struggle with is understanding why, and that is exactly what Lean Six Sigma is built to discover. A quick self-check helps: are the same problems happening repeatedly; are processes slow or error-prone; are customers or staff frustrated by how work is done; can you measure the problem? Several yeses suggest a strong fit.

Top Tips

• Prioritise issues that hurt customers, staff, cost or productivity.
• Recurring problems are the strongest candidates for improvement projects.
• Lean Six Sigma projects find the root cause – if you already (genuinely) know the root cause, you don’t need a Lean Six Sigma project!

Lean Six Sigma is used to improve quality, reduce waste, remove inefficiencies and create more value for customers. Mapping common process problems to potential Lean Six Sigma projects might look like:

• Slow responses to customers become a project to reduce enquiry-response delays.
• Orders going out wrong become a project to improve order accuracy.
• A painful sign-off becomes a streamlined approval or purchasing process.
• Slow onboarding becomes a faster, smoother experience for new joiners.
• Defects in production become a targeted reduction in errors.
• Inconsistent service becomes improved speed and quality of delivery.

We refer to these as cause-unknown problems. Notice also that these are problems are specific – “Slow onboarding” is specific about speed rather than “the onboarding experience is terrible” which would be vauge. You can get stuck into a specific problem and solve it much more quickly than a broad and non-specific problem.

Top Tips

• Problems are opportunities to make the process better.
• Lean Six Sigma is best for problems where the root cause is not already known.
• Select specific issues to address. Break broad problems down.
• Picture the problem as the start of a project, not a permanent state.

The reason firefighting never works is that it treats the symptoms while the root cause survives to resurface. Lean Six Sigma breaks that cycle with DMAIC: Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control, a structured sequence that forces you to understand the problem with data before acting:

• Define – get clarity on exactly what the problem is before doing anything else.
• Measure – verify the magnitude of the problem – the baseline process performance.
• Analyse – identify the root causes of the problem and verify their impact on the process performance
• Improve – test solutions targeted at those causes.
• Control – implement controls to sustain the solutions and re-baseline the process

We verify as we go along through each project phase. By comparing data from Measure and Control we verify the overall impact of the project.

Top Tips

• Resist the urge to firefight – understand the problem before fixing it.
• Use data, not assumptions, to find the real cause and verify solutions
• Don’t forget Control – it stops the problem coming back.