Where lean management techniques seek to eliminate waste from a business process, six sigma methodology is applied to eliminate variance. Of course the lines between the two have become blurred over recent years with many companies deploying a ‘lean six sigma’ (they must have been days on that one) approach to continuous improvement. Perhaps Six Sigma is the more scary and therefore less widely adopted of the two – the reason for which can be summed up in one word. Statistics.
Scratch below the surface however and you’ll quickly realise that statistics is just one element of six sigma and the available software does all the heavy lifting anyway. The attraction of six sigma lies in its factual truth, for it based on data – the data that your business collects but often doesn’t use effectively – if at all – to support decision making.
As well as being a support group for users at all levels of sigma, this workshop is for those asking ‘Is Six Sigma for me?’ We pick apart the toolbox, look at case studies, ‘show and tell’ our projects and share our deployment ‘war stories’. We don’t want to scare new entrants off, so we’ve even given it a more user friendly name – Process Excellence – but then that’s the whole point, isn’t it?