Lean Six Sigma is a method that relies on a collaborative team effort to improve performance by systematically removing waste and reducing variation. It combines lean manufacturing/lean enterprise and Six Sigma to eliminate the eight kinds of waste (muda).
As a manufacturer, we want our defects rate to be as close as possible to the “Six Sigma level, 3.4 defects per million opportunities” (DPMO) on products we fabricate. A possibly overlooked key is how we manage our suppliers’ defects; what they do with the recovered contents off the parts we reject and return to…
Traditionally in the Service Industry, Operational Excellence (OpEx) focused on the Operations function: Back and Mid Offices fulfilling the client’s request. Main focus was on decreasing handling and throughput time, with techniques like Lean Thinking, Six Sigma and Scientific Management. The goal was mainly to let humans work more efficiently. However, in the last years,…
We welcome Philip Holt, Vice President of Operational Excellence at GKN Aerospace, for a conversation on State of Readiness. We start off the program discussing Philip’s two books, “Leading with Lean” and “The Simplicity of Lean”; the latter having won the Bronze Medal in the Axiom Book Awards. We take a walk in Philip’s shoes…
One of the biggest challenges of a Lean Transformation is to create the ‘Vision of Excellence’; what should we aim to achieve over the coming years, what is possible? This is often problematic because the majority of people in the organisation ‘don’t know what they don’t know’; that is, they haven’t seen what truly Operationally…
This is an except from Chapter-1, Introduction from my book, “The Simplicity of Lean”. Lean means many things to many people and its success or failure is important to a large number of stakeholders: customers, employees, management, shareholders, suppliers, and society as a whole. Is Lean a toolkit? Is it about cost saving? Is it…
The art of debate has devolved. No longer is it used as a tool of discovery, understanding, reconciliation, and progress. Today, it is a tool used to beat one another into submission – with the wholesale surrender of the beliefs and values held by one party over the other being the goal. What’s worse, the…
