Lean Six Sigma Tool Evolution to a Business Management System

Six Sigma can be considered an evolution of Shewhart’s work. It is an effective program for process improvements. Quality professionals must not let it fall into the chasm of previous approaches that many people believed didn’t work. It must be done well by competent practitioners to keep that from happening.

There has been failures of improvement systems. However, it seems to me that these tools should be integrated into an overall thought system for improving so that the right tools is used at the right time. If you don’t, practitioners (Lean or Six Sigma) will be considering their tools as a hammer hunting for a nail. The figures in the previous referenced Quality Digest article address one approach for this roadmap integration.

The reason previous systems failed is that I think they often addressed a problem that was not the best problem to address for the business as a whole; e.g., Lean Six Sigma and TQM are not business systems that often hunt for projects to address. Scorecards, strategic planning, and business improvement need to be tied together as part of an overall business system. A business system that accomplishes this is describe in the paper “C-Suite: The Need to Re-think our Business System’s Strategic Planning, Scorecard Creation, and Process Improvement Efforts”