Regardless of your industry, the business world grows more competitive each year. Everyone is tightening their belts, reigning in budgets, and looking for ways to do more with less. Unless you follow suit, your company will not be able to keep up, much less surpass your competition. To break out and become a leader in your industry you need an edge that will give you a competitive advantage over your competition. Successful, thriving companies gain that edge by finding a way to involve their employees in streamlining their operations to produce products that exceed their customers’ expectations.
Lean Six Sigma is a framework that can be adapted and applied to any industry to help business leaders gain that competitive edge. Lean Six Sigma allows you to eliminate waste, reduce your costs and increase your revenue while getting your employees directly involved in perfecting the processes of your company.
Understanding the Basic Principles of Lean Six Sigma
Lean Six Sigma can help you streamline any process to lower cost and waste and improve quality and revenue using the following five basic steps:
- Define areas for improvement and outline steps to remove obstacles and correct issues.
- Measure the success and failure of current process.
- Review measurement data, possibly adjust collection process, and narrow down the true sources of defects and waste.
- Seek solutions from employees directly involved with process, plan and implement solutions.
- Deploy control structures to sustain the improvement.
Lean Six Sigma techniques work best for those processes that produce collectable data, have an obvious starting point for improvement, and whose improvement will impact revenue, quality, efficiency and cost.
How Lean Six Sigma Can Help Your Small to Medium Sized Business Gain the Edge
One of the common myths about lean six sigma is that it only works in large organisations who can easily dedicate 4 to 6 months to the project and already have redundancy built into their operations with millions of dollars to spend on implementing the process. This simply isn’t true as the methods can be scaled to help small companies balance the costs associated with change and the ultimate benefits that improving their processes will provide.
Lean Six Sigma can bring immediate change to small businesses by helping them to reduce their cost of inventory, reduce their rate of employee turnover, and reduce the amount of overtime that is paid to employees while helping companies grow through the positive cash flow that results from quicker turn of their inventory and receivables. Customer satisfaction is often increased as quality goes up and overhead costs are reduced, which can only benefit the long term stability and viability of the small business. These benefits are of tremendous value since so many small to medium sized businesses operate with smaller budgets, profit margins and room for error as compared to larger companies.
Learn More About Lean Six Sigma with Free Online Resources
There are several great resources available online that can help you to learn more about Lean Six Sigma and how it’s methods can help you to improve the operation of your company so that you streamline processes, lower overhead, improve quality, boost employee performance, increase customer loyalty and raise your profits. One of these resources includes the eBook Six Sigma Guerrilla Guide.
As you look through these resources, it’s only natural that you are excited about the potential for Lean Six Sigma to improve your processes and increase your profits. It’s also understandable that you also have at least a few questions on how to get started implementing Lean Six Sigma in your company.
Are You Ready to Lead?
If you are ready to gain the competitive advantage and become a leader in your industry, why not contact us today for more information? Regardless of your industry, the size of your company, or your previous management experience, our Business Improvement Consultants can train and guide you to master the concepts of Lean Six Sigma and successfully deploy them in your organisation.
At Integrated Compliance Solutions, our expert consultants can assist your business in completing an ISO gap analysis, ISO 9001 internal audit, ISO internal audit and ISO audit. For more information, get in touch with us today.