The Difference Of Lean Manufacturing and Lean Six Sigma

Are you back and forth on which type program to use to improve your manufacturing plant you will find that there are many to look into that can help reduce wastes and to increase efficiency. There are two popular programs used by many companies in order to help meet these goals. Six Sigma and lean manufacturing are two of the program that are commonly used as they help to provide you with a stronger organization and one that can provide you with a great reduction in waste. Debating between lean Six Sigma and lean manufacturing can be confusing as they both provide great results. Let's explore the various elements of both programs so you can figure out which program will be better for your organization.

Lean Manufacturing
With lean manufacturing you will have different methods that you can use in order to manage your organization effectively. You need to be able to keep your company organized properly so you can try and produce your products in a timely manner without having defects and other hang-ups and things that get in the way. Lean manufacturing is known as the Toyota way and it is used to help eliminate waste that occurs within the organization.

Your company will go through all of the different activities and things that you are dealing with and you need to find the things that are not adding value to the company. Finding the right type of services and things that will help the company will be able to give you lower costs but it really does help to shorten the amount of time you are wasting on your manufacturing process.

With lean manufacturing you will have several different methods such as Kaizen, 5S, Kanban, and one-piece flow. These methods are all beneficial in helping your company to provide you with the right type of system that will keep your costs down and can help you to stay organized with the company and eliminate waste. Having a system where things are streamlined makes it much easier for you to be able to rely on your employees to pull their weight with the organization as they are all responsible for problem solving and they will also focus on coming up with solutions to help eliminate waste on a regular basis and not just for a one-tome thing.

Lean Six Sigma
Now that you understand lean manufacturing we can look into what lean Six Sigma and how it will impact your organization. Using Lean Six Sigma you typically follow the DMAIC program as it will be able to help you figure out a new approach to solving the problems that are at hand within your organization. Using DMAIC you will focus on finding and eliminating the defects that are occurring within your organization.

With Lean Six Sigma your company will focus efforts more on the things that can provide you with higher results and have a greater outcome for the organization. Many companies will turn to value stream mapping in order to help you identify the opportunities that are available in order to help your organization.

Six Sigma is one of the things that has a lot of different tools that are used. You also need to worry about the cost to implement it as it is very expensive compared to other methods to work on reducing wastes. Usually you need to hire a Lean Six Sigma expert to come into the company and to train your employees. Then you will have different people that are trained in Black Belts and so forth, which can become pretty costly to the company.