The basics of Six Sigma were actually designed to improve the performance in the manufacturing industry, originally developed as a kind of quality control, especially for large scale manufacturing companies. The main purpose of this quality control system was to improve the manufacturing processes along with eliminating the number of defects found in them. Later, the Six Sigma methodology was extended to other types of industries all over the world. Let’s dive into what Six Sigma is, and what we mean when we say Six Sigma manufacturing.

Lean Six Sigma is a synergized managerial concept of Lean and Six Sigma. Lean traditionally focuses on the elimination of the eight kinds of waste/Muda classified as defects, over-production, waiting, non-utilized talent, transportation, inventory, motion, and extra-processing. Six-Sigma seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects (errors) and minimizing variability in (manufacturing and business) processes. Together, Lean aims to achieve continuous flow by tightening the linkages between process steps while Six Sigma focuses on reducing process variation (in all its forms) for the process steps thereby enabling a tightening of those linkages. In short, Lean exposes sources of process variation and Six Sigma aims to reduce that variation enabling a virtuous cycle of iterative improvements towards the goal of continuous flow.