Lean Thinking and Six Sigma
De Koning et al. works (2016), is centered primarily on the industrialization of healthcare. They claim that; for healthcare to be sustainable – cost-efficient, competitive, and up-to-date – it requires systematic innovation. The authors declare that Six Sigma and Lean Thinking to be the most popular and current innovation approaches in business. Further, due to the limitations in both of them, they recommend an integration of the two to form Lean Six Sigma. They ultimately show the effectiveness of Lean Six Sigma in a healthcare setting – Red Cross Hospital based in the Netherlands – in three problematic areas.
Lean Six Sigma
Japanese companies, inclusive of Toyota, developed lean thinking. Lean is characterized by an integrated system that consists of tools, practices, and principles, and helps organizations to synchronize workflow, decrease waste, and manage fluctuations that exist in the flow of production. In short, it advocates value-added procedures that attract customers. Although, this innovation strategy is weak in quality improvement (QI), control, organizational infrastructure, and deployment plans. On the other hand, Six Sigma originated from Motorola as a holistic company approach for QI. This technique is mostly deployed in the conducting of improvement projects and contains five stages; define, measure, analyze, improve, and control (DMAIC). In achieving this technique, an organizational structure will need competent project owners and project leaders. The strength of the technique is that it is best suited for complex issues; however, it highly leads to process suboptimization. According to De Koning, integrating the two innovation strategies – to form Lean Six Sigma – increases efficiency. The process of synthesizing Lean Six Sigma mandates five elements. They are an approach that is structured, project-based deployment, competency development, anchoring of solutions, and partnering strategy with respective projects.
Lean Six Sigma Implementation
The implementation of Lean Six Sigma in an organization is excellently portrayed in the research of De Koning et al. (2006). The article depicts three areas in Red Cross Hospital that had vital challenges, and through utilizing the integrated strategy, the organization was able to tackle all of them and set in place a sustainable structure of management. The integrated strategy was implemented in 2002; however, the first step was training the GBs (project leaders) on Six Sigma. Later on, Lean was introduced to their curriculum as they wasted a significant amount of time in solving healthcare problems. In the “analysis” and “improve” phase of Six Sigma, several tools of Lean Thinking were incorporated in their learning. Value-stream maps, time-value maps, and six standard forms of waste time were added in the former, while changes in the latter involved addition of pull systems, 5S method, complexity reduction, among others.
After training, the facility undertook in chronological activities to solve their problems by employing the Lean Six Sigma. An organizational infrastructure of Six Sigma was created, then deployed quality improvement on a project by project. The selection of the project was the responsibility of the champions, the heads in the hospital departments. The three projects chosen were; reducing complexity in the recruiting process; increasing efficiency in the starting times of operating theater; and lastly, maintenance of defective lights. Overall, systemic innovations were able to deliver the intended objectives.
References
De Koning, H., Verver, J. P., van den Heuvel, J., Bisgaard, S., & Does, R. J. (2006). Lean six sigma in healthcare. Journal for Healthcare Quality, 28(2), 4-11.