Six Sigma and Kaizen Working Together
Six Sigma is a business quality improvement tool. Kaizen is a Japanese continuous improvement tool. Separately they are great, but together, they can work wonders for your business.
Kaizen, as a process improvement model on its own, works to affect the way all employees examine their work environments. It aims to create a corporate culture that is constantly seeking improvement, as the Japanese root of the word “Kaizen” suggests. A work environment that has fully embraced Kaizen is always promoting learning and creating new ways for employees to seek opportunities for improvement. Kaizen shines when used in business environments that are so dedicated to the philosophy of delivering value to customers that they are willing to do so at the sacrifice of short-term financial goals. By eliminating the focus on finance, employees often feel freer to think creatively and promote efficiency.
While this description makes Kaizen sound ideal, it’s unfortunate that most US companies do not apply the process in quite this way. Maintaining an environment of continuous improvement proves to be a struggle for companies and instead of continuous work, companies instead employ Kaizen in short bursts. Instead of it being a company-wide culture, a few “chosen” people are used for process improvement projects. While these small groups can deliver results, the root causes of the inefficiencies are often not discovered and results are never completely optimized.
The gaps that are often found in Kaizen can be filled with Six Sigma, and it’s been found that the two process improvement projects can work well together. What is often lacking in Kaizen is the analytical discipline and mathematical foundation that makes it easier to completely understand the nature of a business’ processes and problems. Six Sigma is much more data driven system that weighs value and risk. Where Kaizen can be freeing in its focus on customers and not financial goals, meeting somewhere in the middle may produce far more deliverable results. Focusing on raw data makes it much easier to see dependable results in the end. Making decisions that can potentially affect a company are much easier to make when the data supports the decision.
Ideally, a business environment incorporating both Kaizen and Six Sigma is one where employees are continuously seeking areas of improvement that are then more formally examined with statistical information. The functions of all employees can still be left “up for grabs” when it comes to areas of improvement, however, a “hunch” alone shouldn’t lead to a change in process. This is where Six Sigma can balance out the equation and ensure there will truly be benefits to the change.
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