The integration of Lean Management and Six Sigma

Arnheiter, E. D. & Maleyeff, J. (2005) The integration of Lean Management and Six Sigma, The TQM Magazine, vol. 17, no. 1.

This article was written to “eliminate many misconceptions regarding Six Sigma and Lean Management” by providing descriptions on each system and key concepts and techniques of implementation. It provided a complete discussion of the background and nature of Six Sigma (SS) and Lean Management (LM).

According to the article, the misconceptions regarding Lean Management include: the problem of defining terms as some people define lean as layoffs; the issue of location as it is believed to exclusively work for Japanese organizations because of their unique culture; the limitation of industry and process application as referred only to manufacturing; and the limitation in location as lean only works within specified environments.

Meanwhile, Six Sigma has the following misconceptions: the notion of “flavor of the month” as connected with other quality management theories and strategies like Deming Management, TQM, business process reengineering, (BPR), and ISO 9000; the goal of 3.4 NCPPM as a generalization of absoluteness and should be applied in any opportunity tolerance and specification regardless of its ultimate importance in the customer’s value expression; the idea of similarity as proponents of ZQC systems may conclude as Six Sigma where the ZQC results in zero NCPPM rather than “settling” for 3.4 NCPPM; and the limitation as a quality only program.

The rest of the article tackles the integration of LM and SS as two useful management strategy paradigms. Conclusions presented are focused on the integration of LM and SS creates “a lean, Six Sigma (LSS) organization” that will enjoy the advantages of both while addressing their individual drawbacks.

In critique to this article, facts presented are absolutely true and useful. However, it is still important for quality managers to see to it that the overall nature as well as missions and visions of the whole organization is in complement with the applicability of LM or SS. Also, the trends in the global business arena must be predicted and handled by LM or SS. The effective managerial application is always the basic idea, no matter what management strategy is used, if the manager’s skill is ineffective, efforts will be futile.