Chapter 13: Six sigma management and lean tools. Management Essay

Chapter 13: Six sigma management and lean tools
Summary
The six-sigma is a representation of a well-thought packaging of quality tools as well as philosophies within an honest effort that provides a rigor as well as the aspect of repeating efforts towards quality improvements. In comparison with the traditional continuous improvement, the six-sigma is found to be oriented towards cost-reduction. Such an aspect makes the six-sigma to be more popular amongst the top company management such as the Chief Executive officers as opposed to various quality practitioners who are basically uncomfortable focusing on the outcome results. This happens since it seems as if such a concept works contrary to the several Deming points. The other fundamental nuance that describes Six Sigma involves the way it is organized towards the creation of champions such as the black belts, green belts as well as the yellow belts. The Six Sigma that focuses basically on waste reduction works as a combination with lean production, therefore, referred to as the Lean-Six Sigma (Thomas, Hand, & Turner, 2007).
Figure 1: Six Sigma process (Thomas et al., 2007)
There are various roles as well as titles that define the key players’ efforts within the Six Sigma. Some of the titles include the champion, master black belts, green belts as well as the black belt. In this case, the champion cooperates closely with the black belts alongside the potential black belts in the quest towards the identification of possible available projects. The size of the company determines the place occupied by the champion which could be at the CEO or VP levels. In this case, the champion is identified to act as a funnel through which project ideas as well as the application of Pareto analysis for the purposes of analyzing ideas alongside determination of the place of the best return on investment. The champion, in this case, provides support for the entire project with the results being validated towards the end. Further, the master black belts are identified as experienced and not necessarily found within smaller companies. In this case, those acting as master black belts serve at the position of being mentors as well as trainers for the new recruits of the black belts. This provides an excellent way of proving the in-house type of training (Thomas et al., 2007).
Figure 1: Champion decision-making process (Thomas et al., 2007)
Notably, the black belts present the key Six Sigma individuals and are trained specifically at a cost of over $10,000 but not more than $ 20,000 within a four-month period. The fully trained individuals are well equipped towards helping in full-time cost reduction projects. In this case, the black belts are known to be specialists, therefore, not practical for one firm to have several black belts. This is contrary to green belts, trained for basic quality tools as well as working in teams towards the improvement of quality and are basically recruited on a part-time basis to work on the process as well as design improvement. The expected returns on investment for the Six Sigma projects could as well be projected into hundreds of thousands of US dollars. This means that there is always too much pressure placed on the organization to ensure the achieve...