Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma is an organizational process improvement methodology. Motorola initiated Six Sigma in the 1980s to address company quality issues.

GE under Jack Welch popularized Six Sigma deployments in the mid-1990s. Many companies have followed the GE Six Sigma model. The GE model for Six Sigma incorporated process improvement practitioners called black belts and green belts to facility improvement efforts. Champions are to be executives that support the completion of the process improvement efforts, which are to have significant financial benefit.

Lean was added to Six Sigma around the beginning of the 21st century.

Six Sigma is traditional considered a methodology for reducing defects. Lean efforts focus on reducing organization waste. The seven types of lean waste are overproduction, waiting, transportation, inventory, over-processing, motion, and defects.

The metrics often associated with Six Sigma are striving to achieve a process output response of Six Sigma or 3.4 parts per million non-conformance rate. This rate of issue occurrence could be expressed as defects per million opportunities. Other metrics associated with Six Sigma are process capability indices such as Cp and Cpk.

Both Six Sigma and lean deployments have issues relative to metric reporting and silo implementations. These issues are overcome with the Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) system.

Enhanced Approach for Lean Six Sigma in Healthcare Insurance Industry

Lean Six Sigma, Process Improvement Training and Certification /

While a great deal of process improvement work has finally begun to take hold within healthcare around patient safety and hospital operational efficiencies, what about the other non-clinical aspects of the overall healthcare system which can consume physician resources and adversely impact hospital finances? Healthcare insurance processes can have a major impact on both patient care as well as operational efficiencies. This paper describes how one healthcare insurance company has begun to use Six Sigma to not only make itself more efficient and effective internally, but is now also directing its energies toward lowering medical costs while improving patient service and outcomes

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Enhancement to Six Sigma Metrics

DMAIC process improvement project, Lean Six Sigma /

This described predictive reporting technique overcomes issues that occur with the traditional Six Sigma metrics of sigma quality level and process capability indices  (e.g., Cp , Cpk, Pp, and Ppk).  The provided 30,000-foot-level report-out template provides a process stability assessment and a futuristic statement for stable processes in words that are easy to understand —

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