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What is your response to the executive at a company that says, “We’ve tried TQM
– total quality management – and continuous improvement in the past. We did it in the
eighties. We’ve did it in the nineties”. I’m sure this sounds familiar. What’s
different with Lean Six Sigma? What’s your response to executives that push back on a
change initiative like Lean Six Sigma?
Okay. And I think that’s important. Because we have come across companies who will call
us and they’ll say, ‘You know what? We tried Lean Six Sigma. It wasn’t successful.
We don’t know what went wrong” and so on. We’ve also had companies. I’ve been
in doing a leadership session, and I’ll have a VP stand up and make the comment, ‘You
know what? We’re going to embark upon Lean Six Sigma. We’re going to do it very cautiously.
Lean Six Sigma is no different than TQM of olden days’. And leadership shakes their
heads and say, ‘Okay, this is going to require too much of us then. And they’re content’
and so on. Lean Six Sigma and TQM are not the same. Okay. They are not the same. I went
through the TQM days. I had my process improvement guide, which we call the pig. And we had our
book of tools. And if I wanted to see a control chart, if I wanted to see a run chart, if
I wanted to see a regression line, or whatever, I could look in my pig and so on. However,
I didn’t – and this was back in the, I’m going to say, eighties and so on – see any
part of industries, or whatever, really take hold and move out with TQM, and make it really
turn around their business if they were in trouble, or enhance their output, and so on,
because it was somewhat disjointed. So here’s what I’m going to say. These are the differences
I found. First of all, Lean Six Sigma; there’s financial accountability. There’s no sense
in embarking upon – and what I tell people and in front a management or a leadership
team, or something – Lean Six Sigma unless you’re going to have a level of financial
accountability in which you now look to see the success of your Lean Six Sigma. Okay.
Do you have? Lean Six Sigma as opposed to TQM also has an infrastructure. Now, some
people are apposed to that infrastructure. I’m going to say what the infrastructure
does is it gives you the capability to support whatever level of involvement you want with
Lean Six Sigma. It also gives you a skill set. Because within that infrastructure, you
have capability identified. In other words, I want somebody to have a skill set of a green
belt. And with that skill set, requires such and such. These statistical tools – SPC
-, and knowledge of regression, and so on. There’s a skill set required of black belts.
And it’s basically standardized in terms of, they need to know how to design of experiments,
they need to know how to assist green belts, and so on. But with that structure now comes
the ability to align the organization so that you can take on projects, so that you can
solve problems systematically. The methodology is systematic. Now, once again, it depends
on how the company deploys it. But there’s a systematic approach to doing Lean Six Sigma.
The methodology we call, we haven’t mentioned it yet, I don’t want to get into it in too
level of detail, but DMAIC. In other words, define the problem; define what the customer
wants; define where we want to go. Measure: How good are you doing. What is the capability
of your current process? Analyze: What is the route cause for a gap existing between
what my customer wants and what I am capable of providing? Improvement: How am I going
to improve that process, statistically, so that what I do actually makes a difference,
and it’s a different process – or I should say, it’s an improved process – and it
has solved the root cause, not the symptoms? And then lastly, put that process – once
you have enhanced it, once you have used the tools and techniques to improve it – in
control so you sustain the gain. So that’s systematic. The other thing Lean Six Sigma
does, as apposed to TQM; TQM was a set of tools and that kind of stuff, but it didn’t
have the latest techniques. Today, Lean Six Sigma goes well beyond. If somebody were to
say Lean Six Sigma is what it was six years ago, I would say they’re totally wrong.
The latest techniques, today, allow you to optimize your process, validate that it’s
been optimized, test to make sure it’s going to satisfy the customer. And you use the advanced
techniques. You use the computer power which we have today, which we didn’t have back
in the TQM days. Computers are unbelievable. I can do things like Monte Carlo simulation,
which I can do a million runs in the matter of thirty seconds and test out something to
see if it’s going to satisfy the spec limits that I want. Also, the software today is unbelievable
compared to what we had in the TQM days; if we did have software back then. So, those
are major differences between Lean Six Sigma and TQM. And the other thing I’m going to
say is, Lean Six Sigma; if you really want – and I’ve said it several times. I’m
beating a dead horse maybe – to see Lean Six Sigma take hold and get the results that
you’re capable of getting, leadership and management have to be engaged and involved.
And back in the TQM days, I didn’t see that level of support from managers and leaders.
I got my pig guide and I walked around looking for things to improve with whatever tools
I wanted to use, and that was it.