Mason: The value of Lean Six Sigma is truly in the benefit of Lean and Six Sigma. Lean is all about reducing waste in your processes where a Six Sigma is all about reducing variation. So, you really get the benefit by applying it and understanding it. A cool example about lean is, say you three story office and you want to figure out where to place a printer. So, the placement of the printer, depends on how far certain employees have their walk to that printer. So, if you have someone on the third floor, and the printers, on the first floor, they are spending a lot of motion waste traveling up and down those stairs or elevator to access that printer. So, a quick solution of that would be put the printer in a centrally located area and that would really help reduce motion waste. For Six Sigma, it is all about eliminating variation. Say you are making shoes. And of every 400 shoes you make, about 40 have the laces on the wrong spot. With Six Sigma, we go in there and study with our Six Sigma tools to reduce that variation and make sure you are making the same shoe every single time and you are hitting that same target; all the Lace holes are the same. You really want to get four hundred out of four hundred shoes good for your customer.
Lin: To me, the value of Lean Six Sigma is very simple. A main focus of lean is about eliminating waste. There are eight waste in the lean methodologies. So, eliminating those wastes will eliminate expenses that will make operations much more optimized, taking less time to build products and provide services. So lean methodologies are critical to optimizing any operation it can be from manufacturing to an office to actually your home. You can apply the lean principles to your home activities. So lean is very easy to implement and very effective.
Jeff: I think the value of Lean Six Sigma, everybody talks about eliminating waste, everybody talks about reducing variation. But I think the value of Lean Six Sigma is that it really focuses in on customers, it really focuses in on people within an organization who can begin to implement these methodologies, tools and reengineer processes and make a better way of life for themselves internally at work and also meeting their customers’ needs and expectations or exceeding those needs and expectations. So, the value is really integrating this methodology into organizations, so you can help your communities, you can help businesses and you can help organizations begin to thrive and to begin to change the way they do business, to come out of any kind of situation better and more innovative. Instead of just reducing variation in waste, you can take the next leap so you can be sustainable in a changing, competitive environment.
