Lean Six Sigma: Combining Six

The Breakthrough Program for Increasing Quality, Shortening Cycle Times, and Creating Shareholder Value In Every Area of Your Organization

Time and quality are the two most important metrics in improving any company's production and profit performance. Lean Six Sigma explains how to impact your company's performance in each, by combining the strength of today's two most important initiatives--Lean Production and Six Sigma--into one integrated program.

The first book to provide a step-by-step roadmap for profiting from the best elements of Lean and Six Sigma, this breakthrough volume will show you how to:

• Achieve major cost and lead time reductions this year
• Compress order-to-delivery cycle times
• Battle process variation and waste throughout your organization

Separately, Lean Production and Six Sigma have changed the face of the manufacturing business. Together, they become an unprecedented tool for improving product and process quality, production efficiency, and across-the-board profitability. Lean Six Sigma introduces you to today's most dynamic program for streamlining the performance of both your production department and your back office, and providing you with the cost reduction and quality improvements you need to stay one step ahead of your competitors.

"Lean Six Sigma shows how Lean and Six Sigma methods complement and reinforce each other. If also provides a detailed roadmap of implementation so you can start seeing significant returns in less than a year."----From the Preface

Businesses fundamentally exist to provide returns to their stakeholders. Lean Six Sigma outlines a program for combining the synergies of these two initiatives to provide your organization with greater speed, less process variation, and more bottom-line impact than ever before.

A hands-on guidebook for integrating the production efficiencies of the Lean Enterprise with the cost and quality tools of Six Sigma, this breakthrough book features detailed insights on:

• The Lean Six Sigma Value Proposition--How combining Lean and Six Sigma provides unmatched potential for improving shareholder value
• The Lean Six Sigma Implementation Process--How to prepare your organization for a seamless incorporation of Lean Six Sigma tools and techniques
• Leveraging Lean Six Sigma--Strategies for extending Lean Six Sigma's reach within and beyond your corporate walls

"Variation is evil."----Jack Welch

Six Sigma was the zero-variation quality lynchpin around which Jack Welch transformed GE into one of the world's most efficient--and valuable--corporations. Lean Production helped Toyota cut waste, slash costs, and substantially improve resource utilization and cycle times.

Yet, as both would admit, there was still room for improvement.

Lean Six Sigma takes you to the next level of improvement, one that for the first time unites product and process excellence with the goal of enhancing shareholder value creation. Providing insights into the application of Lean Six Sigma to both the manufacturing processes and the less-data-rich service and transactional processes, it promises to revolutionize the performance efficiencies in virtually every area of your organization--as it positively and dramatically impacts your shareholder value.

Michael L. George is founder and president of George Group which, with over 70 consultants, is the largest Six Sigma consulting practice in the United States. The firm also provides its clients with a wealth of experience in Lean Methods, Supply Chain Acceleration, and other essential business strategies.