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Six Sigma and Its Relationship to Lean Manufacturing

According to Wikipedia, "Six Sigma was originally developed as a set of practices designed to improve manufacturing processes and eliminate defects, but its application was subsequently extended to other types of business processes as well. In Six Sigma, a defect is defined as anything that could lead to customer dissatisfaction." In recent years, Six Sigma has sometimes been combined with Lean manufacturing to yield a methodology named Lean Six Sigma.

Lean Six Sigma efforts have been especially important in the face of the growing global competition that most manufacturers face today. As a result, it's become increasingly clear that customers are only willing to pay for value. Yet, 95% of lead time is consumed with non-value added activities, an increasingly impactful issue across global supply chains.

A typical Lean Six Sigma deployment consists of:

1. Specify value from the customers perspective
2. Map the value stream
3. Create flow
4. Let the customer pull
5. Pursue perfection relentlessly

As a result, one of the foundational tenants of Six Sigma is a clear commitment to making decisions on the basis of verifiable data, rather than assumptions and guesswork.

The Right Lean Manufacturing Tools Drive a Lean Supply Chain

In an increasingly dynamic and volatile manufacturing environment, the successful deployment of Lean Six Sigma requires the support of the right Lean manufacturing tools. Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ plays a key role in each step. RapidResponse touches these Lean Six Sigma deployment process step using the Jenjitsu approach rather than intuition, experience or historical playbooks. For example, value streams map the materials flowing from supplier to customer and information flow from customer to supplier, a closed loop system ideally. RapidResponse facilitate these essential, collaborative information flows to support this stage in the process.

RapidResponse is also used to drive cycle time reductions in all aspects of the business, including: shorter sales & operations planning (S&OP) times, bills of material (BOM) analysis to define and strategize long lead time components, cycle time reductions with pull based systems (kanban, internal and with suppliers), and constraint or "bottleneck" management. In all of these areas, cycle time improvements translate directly into inventory reductions.

RapidResponse ensures that everyone throughout your supply chain organization is working from a single version of the truth, driving fact-based decisions consistent with the requirements of a Six Sigma program.