Consulting services for lean and six sigma

Before we can begin to talk about consulting services for lean and six sigma manufacturing it is important that you understand what lean manufacturing and six sigma manufacturing is. But also another thing that you need to know is that before you begin using lean or six sigma manufacturing in your company you should first take a look at the 5S's, which is a way to help reduce waste in your company. This program is actually one of the first steps that your consultants will tell you to take if you are going to implement lean or six sigma manufacturing.

For those of who are unfamiliar with the term Six Sigma let's take a minute to find out what it is. Six Sigma is a method or a set of techniques and in the business world it has become a movement that is focused on business process improvement. Six Sigma is a quality measurement and improvement program that is designed to focus on improving the capability of a company's business processes.

Lean manufacturing is an initiative that focuses on cost reduction and increases in turnover by constantly and methodically eliminating activities that do not add value to the manufacturing process. Basically what lean manufacturing does is help companies to achieve targeted productivity, as well as other things, by introducing tools and techniques that are easy to apply and maintain. What these tools and techniques are doing is reducing and eliminating waste, things that are not needed in the manufacturing process.

Now that you understand what both types of manufacturing process lean and six sigma are you are ready to look for consultants in these fields. One of the best things about looking for consultants in these areas is that many times the consultants are trained in both types of programs, what this means is that you can find a consultant who understands both lean manufacturing and six sigma manufacturing. And since they understand both programs they can recommend a process that will work best for your company and then they can provide you with the training that you are going to need.

Here are some tips to finding consulting services for lean and six sigma manufacturing.

Tip one:
The first place that you should look is at other businesses in your industry. You can approach the upper management to see if they have adopted six sigma or lean manufacturing and if they have you can find out where they went for training and if they would recommend the same trainer for your company. You can also find out what they liked about the consulting services that they used and what they would have wanted to change about the services that they received.

Tip two:
One of the best places to go to find six sigma consulting services is online. You can go to any search engine and type in the words six sigma or lean manufacturing consultants and you will be directed to numerous websites that offer six sigma or lean manufacturing consulting services. You can also look in the yellow pages to see if you can find any consulting firms in there. Some of the more popular websites are: www.isixsigma.com www.6sigma.us

Tip three:
Once you have found a few consulting firms that you think are good you are going to want to start the process of finding out which firms are better than the others. To do this you are going to need to interview the people who provide the training to see what they are capable of, you are going to want to check out the reputation of the six sigma consulting firm with other businesses and you are going to want to check their references that they can provide you with. If they can't or won't provide you with references then you might want to go somewhere else.