This is the second post in a two part review of the discipline called Lean Six Sigma. The first part of the discussion can be found here.
When I was in college at RPI, I segued from the core Engineering curriculum into a degree called Management Engineering. This degree had elements of Industrial Engineering, but also dove very deep into computers, statistics and operations research. As a result, graduates could pursue a variety of career paths including manufacturing, software development and various quantitative careers. I chose the software development direction, but also used the problem solving skills I’d learned. Later, a manager noticed those problem solving skills and offered me a position in operations management. I worked with teams to solve problems, organize processes and eliminate waste, but we did it on an ad hoc basis and had nothing like a Lean Six Sigma methodology to guide us. I’m proud of the work we did,but I soon got interested in products and moved into product management and R & D. In software project management, I tracked defects using databases and graphics, but never dove back into the statistics that I’d enjoyed so much in college.
I later shifted into product management for other products. In one particular case, we had a multi-million dollar customer who was very upset because the product process for an embedded voice mail system had fallen out of control. I was asked to solve the problem and took over program management for the product. I worked closely with our customer, manufacturing, sales and our quality department. We listened carefully to the customer and improved both the quality and efficiency of the product process. Within a year, the customer awarded our team a quality award in recognition of our progress. Once again, I’d worked with a team to solve problems, this time for an external customer. Our quality team used a number of statistical techniques to demonstrate our improved process quality and we used Pareto charts to identify and solve major problems. Sounds a lot like Lean Six Sigma. We listened carefully to our customer and let them guide us on which problems were the most important to solve.
Fast forward to this year and my participation in this course. The cool thing about Lean Six Sigma for me is that is takes ALL of the skills I learned in my university studies, plus lots of hard earned learnings from different points in my career and weaves them together into a coherent methodology which is great for solving problems. The review of statistics and other analytical tools in the course was an excellent refresher — I’d studied most of these techniques at RPI — and the techniques are highly relevant in today’s business environment. Analytics and quantitative analysis are hot in a wide variety of fields today, including politics, social media, medical devices, telecom and marketing. Companies like people with experience, but they like it even more if people can analyze data and use it to back up their ideas. The course also offered a variety of approaches for getting information from customers, including ideas on data driven approaches such as surveys and interviews. This ties well into contemporary marketing approaches where listening to the Voice of the Customer is critical and analytical tools such as A / B testing for new marketing campaign ideas are increasingly common.
In short, I’m really glad I took the Lean Six Sigma course. It’s equipped me with a useful philosophy for process and quality improvement and the tools we studied should be useful for numerous business situations. Lean Six Sigma. Check it out.