History of Continuous Improvement

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Lean Six Sigma is a proven business process improvement methodology that builds on the best practices and experiences of earlier approaches. It combines best practices around customer focus, empowered teams, process definition, and data analysis.

Quick reference

History of Continuous Improvement

Lean Six Sigma is a proven business process improvement methodology that builds on the best practices and experiences of earlier approaches.  It combines best practices around customer focus, empowered teams, process definition, and data analysis.

When to use

Lean Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology.  It can be used to improve any existing business process. The roots of Lean Six Sigma draw from customer focus, teamwork, process definition, and data analysis. Therefore, it is particularly powerful when teams are addressing customer’s problems due to the performance of business processes in which data can be collected and analyzed.

Instructions

This module is not instructional in nature but rather is contextual.  Understanding the context of where Lean Six Sigma came from will help to understand how it is best applied.  In addition, if you are planning on sitting for an International Association of Six Sigma Certification (IASSC) exam, you will be tested on the history of Lean Six Sigma – along with the methodology and tools.

Process improvement approaches have been around for many years.  However, the business-wide process improvement movement took off in the second half of the 20th century.  Business-wide quality improvement methodologies were introduced.  These included Total Quality Management (TQM), Kaizen, and PDCA.  All provided good foundational elements, but each had some limitations and blind spots.  In addition, many organizations were creating process improvement methodologies.  Some of the better known were the Kepner Tregoe approach and the Ford Eight Discipline process.  These provided good structure but were somewhat weak on analytical tools.  Governments also got involved by sponsoring national quality awards like Japan’s Deming Prize and the USA’s Malcolm Baldrige Award.  Also by the end of the 20th century, comprehensive international standards for quality management had been created, the most notable with ISO9000.  By this time, Lean and Six Sigma were getting a lot of publicity and spawning spinoff methodologies such as Design for Six Sigma and what we are discussing, Lean Six Sigma.

Since Lean Six Sigma is a combination of both of those programs, let’s look a little deeper into the history of those.  The concept of “sigma” goes back to the early 1800’s when Gauss formulated the normal distribution, or bell-shaped curve, and kicked off the study of statistics.  Professor Shewhart extended that to the concept of statistical process control in manufacturing and both taught the principles and applied them to US industries during World War II.  Statistical process control was well accepted by the 1980’s when Bob Smith of Motorola, expanded it into a problem-solving methodology and codified the system.  It was adopted throughout Motorola and the first “Blackbelt” was certified in 1991.  The success at Motorola got the attention of Larry Bossidy at Allied Signal and Jack Welch at General Electric and they adopted the program.  From there it gained widespread publicity and acceptance.  It is now an industry with university programs, standards, consultants, and certification.

The development of Lean has some similarities with Six Sigma. The idea of manufacturing process codification and management was pioneered in the early 1800’s by Eli Whitney who created products with interchangeable parts allowing an assembly line to be created. By the end of the 1800's, Fredrick Winslow Taylor and Frank Gilbreath were promoting process optimization with time and motion studies. These gained widespread acceptance after being adopted by Henry Ford.  Following World War II, the Toyota company in Japan worked with these principles and added management tools and analysis over the years eventually creating the Total Production Control methodology.  In the 1990s, this methodology was widely publicized by Womack, Jones, and Roos and it was adopted by manufacturing companies around the world. Both Lean and Six Sigma were striving to optimize manufacturing processes, so the blending of the approaches soon occurred.

 The Lean Six Sigma approach embodies the best practices that were developed by the various improvement approaches.

Hints & tips

Some improvement approaches have fallen into traps and pitfalls leaving the teams adrift or frustrated and the business fails to realize the promised benefit.  Lean Six Sigma has tried to avoid these, but a company’s implementation of the approach can still create these problems.

  • If the approach becomes too rigid it becomes bureaucratic and slows down.
  • If the emphasis is only on principles, teams won’t have the tools to be able to implement the principles.
  • If the emphasis becomes too heavy on tools teams won’t understand the principles and when to use the tools. Soon they try using all tools all the time – which is unnecessary.
  • Data must be collected and analyzed to get through several of the Lean Six Sigma phases. By combining Lean and Six Sigma, there should be multiple sources of data and the teams should use all that apply to their problem.
  • Teams need to ensure their solutions align with strategy, the customer focus, and Tollgate Reviews will normally ensure this occurs.
  • The approach is project-based so project management is needed on large complex projects or they spiral out of control.
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  • 00:05 Hi, I'm Ray Sheen.
  • 00:06 Let's start our program on Lean Six Sigma with a review
  • 00:10 of the roots of this methodology.
  • 00:13 If you plan on sitting for a Lean Six Sigma Belt exam, you can expect
  • 00:17 several questions concerning the history of Lean Six Sigma Sigma.
  • 00:20 During the second half of the 20th century,
  • 00:23 quality management became an important topic in business management,
  • 00:27 which led to the creation of business-wide process improvement methodologies.
  • 00:31 The first of these to gain wide acceptance was total quality management.
  • 00:35 TQM gave us a top-down framework, but little bottom-up activity.
  • 00:41 So continuous improvement processes like Kaizen and PDCA came to the forefront.
  • 00:47 They emphasized teamwork and action, but with little analysis.
  • 00:52 At the same time,
  • 00:53 many companies were starting to use a disciplined problem-solving process.
  • 00:59 One of these was well-known programs was delivered by the consultants
  • 01:03 Kepner-Tregoe, and
  • 01:05 one of the best-known internal programs was Ford's 8-Discipline or 8D process.
  • 01:10 Governments started getting involved sponsoring national quality awards, like
  • 01:15 the Deming Prize in Japan and the Malcolm Baldrige Award in the United States.
  • 01:20 There was still lots of confusion as to what constituted best practices.
  • 01:25 So the International Standards Organization jumped in with the ISO 9000,
  • 01:30 which was quickly adopted in the late 1990s.
  • 01:33 Also, in the 90s, the Lean manufacturing approach, gained wide recognition.
  • 01:38 I'll talk more about this in a minute.
  • 01:41 And Six Sigma was introduced by Motorola.
  • 01:44 Variations of these came into existence by the beginning of the 21st century,
  • 01:50 including design for Six Sigma and Lean Sigma.
  • 01:53 Since this is a program in Lean Six Sigma,
  • 01:55 I want to explore the roots of both of these in a little more detail.
  • 01:59 I'll start with Six Sigma.
  • 02:01 Six Sigma could trace its routes all the way back to the early 1800s in Carl Gauss,
  • 02:06 who established many of the foundational statistical analysis principles, including
  • 02:12 the normal distribution, or as it's commonly called, the bell-shaped curve.
  • 02:16 Move forward 100 years and Professor Shewhart at Bell Princeton University
  • 02:21 created the concept of statistical process control and
  • 02:25 applied it in several branches of the US government.
  • 02:28 In the mid 1980s, Bob Smith at Motorola expanded on that concept and
  • 02:33 developed the Six Sigma program, which Bob Galvin,
  • 02:37 the Motorola CEO, spread throughout the company.
  • 02:41 Motorola certified their first black belts in 1991.
  • 02:45 The program was so successful that it was adopted into Allied Signal and
  • 02:50 then General Electric, where it received worldwide notice and acclaim.
  • 02:54 By 2000, Six Sigma had become an industry with university programs,
  • 02:59 consultants, training programs, and certifying bodies.
  • 03:03 So let's look at the roots of Lean.
  • 03:06 Process improvement of manufacturing processes took a giant step
  • 03:10 forward in the early 1800s with Eli Whitney
  • 03:13 developing a product design with interchangeable parts.
  • 03:17 Well, that improved the material side of manufacturing processes.
  • 03:20 And Frederick Winslow Taylor and
  • 03:22 Frank Gilbreth focused on improving the labor activities about 100 years later.
  • 03:27 This brings us up to Henry Ford in the production line and
  • 03:30 manufacturing, a process-focused approach.
  • 03:33 Following World War II, Toyota implemented a total production system that optimized
  • 03:39 manufacturing flow and eventually evolved into Lean manufacturing.
  • 03:43 In the early 1990s, Womack, Jones, and Roos documented the Toyota approach and
  • 03:49 disseminated the Lean concept around the world.
  • 03:52 However, Lean seemed to have run its course as a management approach,
  • 03:57 when it was married with Six Sigma at the beginning of the 21st century and
  • 04:02 is now an integral part of Lean Six Sigma.
  • 04:05 As we look at all the improvement approaches that has brought us to
  • 04:09 Lean Six Sigma, there are four common themes that come out.
  • 04:12 Some approaches emphasize one area over another,
  • 04:16 Lean Six Sigma emphasizes all four.
  • 04:19 These are process focused, empowered teams,
  • 04:23 customer focus, and data analysis.
  • 04:26 Process focus means that the team follows a structured process through
  • 04:31 a series of steps.
  • 04:32 They can trust the proven process to guide them to a solution to the problem and
  • 04:37 an improvement in the business process.
  • 04:39 People focus means that an empowered cross-functional team of subject matter
  • 04:44 experts do the process improvement activities, not outside consultants.
  • 04:49 Customer focus means that the improvement is on a process or output that is
  • 04:53 important to the customer, either an internal customer or an external customer.
  • 04:59 And project success is measured by the amount of impact on the customer.
  • 05:04 Finally, the data focus means that the improvement activities rely
  • 05:08 on data to determine the problem and solution, not gut feel.
  • 05:12 In particular, statistical data is used, and of course,
  • 05:17 Lean Six Sigma embraces all of these.
  • 05:20 Let me wrap this up with a few comments about some of the difficulties with
  • 05:24 the earlier process improvement programs and
  • 05:26 how Lean Six Sigma is attempting to overcome these.
  • 05:29 The programs with a rigid methodology became mired in bureaucracy and
  • 05:34 improvement projects often stalled as teams struggled to complete activities
  • 05:39 that did not apply to their project.
  • 05:41 Lean Six Sigma has a structure, but within that structure, the teams can
  • 05:46 choose the tools or techniques that best fit their unique circumstances.
  • 05:51 Principle based methodologies were often short on tools so
  • 05:55 people didn't know how to apply the principles and tool based methodologies
  • 06:00 would get stuck when a team tried to use a tool that did not fit their problem.
  • 06:05 Lean Six Sigma provides principles for guidance and a toolbox of tools
  • 06:10 that the teams can choose from based upon their circumstances.
  • 06:15 Some of the data-driven methods did not provide enough guidance on how to collect
  • 06:19 and validate their data.
  • 06:21 Lean Six Sigma uses both quality and process data,
  • 06:25 so there are more data sources.
  • 06:28 Some methodologies had left the teams to make all their own decisions for
  • 06:32 improvement, and the teams would come up with a solution that was not aligned
  • 06:37 with the organization's strategy.
  • 06:39 The Lean Six Sigma tollgate structure ensures the teams don't get too far out of
  • 06:44 alignment, yet doesn't over control their daily activities.
  • 06:48 Finally, some methodologies ignored the project management aspects, so
  • 06:53 projects became very late overrun and out of control.
  • 06:56 Lean Six Sigma does include project manage deliverables in the methodology.
  • 07:02 So that's some history and background on Lean Six Sigma.
  • 07:05 Now let's dig in and find out how it really works.

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