For my understanding, for any issue, if it can be settled by lower level method, e,g, 5S or Kaizen, it should not climb up for higher level method. Only for those issues that all the low level methods are not able to solve and with the low level methods all the variation are carefully controlled, we can use the DfSS methodology to solve it.

So you should not try to use chainsaw before you tried scissors. The design for six sigma is rarely needed before the first 4 methods be systematic introduced into the organization.

Please don’t laugh at a scientist when their assembly speed is slower than your operator and you still need to pay much higher salary to him.

Thanks Jon.

I appreciate your thoughts. Yes, my comments were glib and not articulated well. As far as the post title goes – being compared to Mr. George sucks but is well-deserved. Truth is that I chose the title because it was catchy; so, not liberal treatment of TQM at all – just marketing instincts took over.

More importantly, the chart ignores the fundamental question that should be asked before using any of these tools: “What problem are you trying to solve?” 5S is a great tool, if hidden abnormalities and certain kinds of waste are an issue for you. It’s not so great if the problem you’re dealing with is, say, lack of alignment among divisions.

Two of three bullets under “5S” and “Kaizen” are not 5S or Kaizen… they are varying levels of “Lean Lite” if you will.

I agree that Mike George has done a great disservice by teaching “Lean is about speed, Six Sigma is for quality.” This “gospel truth” has been repeated ad nauseam in the “lean sigma” world, to the detriment of many…

First, I’m not sure that the chart above is a Continuous Improvement Model per se. It’s missing so much (Hohsin kanri? Team design? Leader standard work? Alignment of incentives?) that at best it’s a Lean Six Sigma getting started guide. As such, it’s Mr. George’s chart, nothing else. There is no wide consensus in the Lean community that this is the prevailing CI model.

There is nothing wrong with a company saying, this is how we will implement and creating a step-wise chart starting with 5S (rarely a bad place to start) and progressing to Six Sigma at a later stage. This happens all of the time and they are all flawed, but OK as long as they are continuously improved.

The apple tree makes sense from the point of view that it takes much less training and overhead to run any number of small kaizen projects than it does to run one full Six Sigma project. Therefore the low-hanging fruits are better picked up using the kaizen approach rather than the Six Sigma approach in terms of cost, speed and broadening people’s involvement in CI.

In my experience, DFSS is left for later because even though design decisions have 85% impact on the cost of the product, design / R&D / innovation departments are traditionally black boxes that shun process and “efficiency”. It takes considerable proof of concept of Lean Six Sigma in production and other areas before the VP of R&D can be cajoled into giving it a try.

As a LSS model this LSS chart is ludicrous for its omissions, but also for including Continuous improvement culture in the same set of bullets with WIP control and procedures and instruction and statistical tools and “QFD” and such. If anyone has found such a neatly packaged CI culture LSS method bullet, please share. If anything, CI culture is the blue arrow going through the whole chart.

I’m interested in your definition of TQM (Total Quality Management). A purists might argue that based on the title of this article you are treating TQM with the kind of liberty as Mr. George did for Lean and Six Sigma.