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Lean Six Sigma Explored - Reducing Wastes, Increasing Profits
By Tony Jacowski

Unlike traditional Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma utilizes the DMAIC method. This stands for define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. These steps will help businesses to reduce and/or eliminate wastes within their processes, thereby improving performance, customer satisfaction, and profits. Utilizing these five phases allows those who embark on Lean Projects to have a clear definition of what they are trying to achieve, how they're going to achieve it, and the path that their business needs to take to arrive at success. The ultimate goal of any Lean Six Sigma project is to reduce or eliminate waste, and utilizing these phases is the path to achieving that goal.

While typical projects will generally focus on finding problems and creating solutions, the lean process focuses on finding and eliminating any wastes in the way of resources, employees, steps, products, processes, and other business elements. The theory is that when you reduce or eliminate wastes, you are able to make processes much more efficient and productive than they might have been otherwise. This is the basic foundation for the successful implementation of Lean Six Sigma. Without this foundation, the entire process will crumble and fall, much like a house that is built from the ground up without its own foundation.

By utilizing the tools offered by Lean Six Sigma, businesses are able to see much more success than they might have otherwise. While it might seem pretty obvious to eliminate wasteful practices within a business, having a structured method on how to do it is often essential to the successful outcome that every business wants. While there are many people out there who will continuously criticize the methods and practices of Lean and traditional Six Sigma, there are many more companies and people who will boost their reputations because they have experienced successful implementation of these process improvement tools.

The practices and methods used by Lean Six Sigma have become almost a standard in the business industry in many regards. It is a revered method of process improvement that many people have proven to be advantageous on various levels of business success. It is well known for being much quicker and efficient than the traditional Six Sigma Process, which is part of what makes it so popular. Businesses that need quick fixes and easy repairs will often rely on Lean Six Sigma to eliminate wastes and reduce all the excess that they can to improve the processes that their business performance on a regular basis.

Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions - Six Sigma Online (http://www.sixsigmaonline.org) offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

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