Lean Six Sigma was born in the manufacturing industry and while it has many powerful applications in other industries, the benefits of its’ application in those other industries often goes unexamined, especially in the world of small business.
In my conversations with Business Owners, one of the first things I see is missing where they are is simply knowing what a process actually is. People can get very involved in everything that they have to do in their business to the point that they “can’t see the forest for the trees”. They’re so busy doing all the things in their business, that they don’t recognize the activities they’re doing as being part of a larger process. This blind spot is often in the way of their ability to recognize problems and create opportunities for improvement, leaving Business Owners feeling frustrated and helpless.
“If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” – W. Edwards Deming
The definition of a process is “a sequence of activities designed to produce a particular outcome”. With that in mind, you can begin to see that anything can be described as a process – from getting ready for work in the morning, to making coffee and including each of the aspects of your business. Processes in small businesses include:
- Manufacturing Products
- Providing Services
- Delivering Products
- Billing and Invoicing
- Sales and Marketing
- Product Development
When Business Owners are trafficking in the world of surviving and making it in their business, they often get stuck in one of three common traps. The first trap is being stuck on the hamster wheel of business operations, that is, running fast and going nowhere. In this trap, you feel run by your business and are easily distracted by what’s immediately in front of you (customer complaints, process breakdowns, production errors, etc.). You feel like there’s no time left to improve anything even though you really want to.
Trap number two is firefighting, or being the hero. This trap is misleading because being the hero who saves the day not only looks good, they get rewarded! Left unattended for too long, this behaviour creates a culture of resentment and cynicism. The illusion lies in the successes of saving the day, all the while masking the systemic process issues that are causing the major problems. No one ever has time to address the root causes of process problems, they’re too busy putting out fires!
The third trap, like the second trap, is deceptive. Human beings are inherently designed to want to fix things, we’re trained to find problems in life and make them better. The issue arises when we miss what’s not immediately obvious for the sake of fixing problems quickly. You genuinely try to improve processes by making them run faster, hiring more people or automating actions, yet you’re left wondering why your problems didn’t go away or sometimes even got worse as a result of your fix. This happens because you’re reacting to process problems with band-aid solutions instead of dealing with the root cause (the source) of your process problems. The third trap is akin to the old adage of looking for your keys where the light is, instead of where you dropped them.
How do you know if you’re in one of the traps? It sounds like this:
- We just can’t seem to move fast enough
- Our product keeps failing the inspection
- We’ve been trying to fix things but we’re still losing revenue
- Our customer delivery was late again
- The staff just don’t seem to get it
- We’re too busy to even try to improve
- I need to work smarter, not harder
- Our business is growing faster then we can keep up
These are common complaints of people working in small to medium business. If you can hear yourself in these common complaints, that’s good news – the first space of process transformation is to get that there’s something missing in your performance. Enter Lean Six Sigma.
Lean is about streamlining processes and eliminating waste. Six Sigma is about reducing variation in processes. Together Lean Six Sigma works to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and overall quality of business processes.
When Lean Six Sigma is successfully applied to small business process problems, there are a range of benefits that Business Owners enjoy:
- Reduced operating costs and improved cash flow
- Increased focus on your customer’s needs
- Being more effective without being busier
- The ability to deliver products or services to customers in any circumstance
- Significantly reduced operating costs
- Clarity around business performance
- Being able to go home on time and trust that things will work without you
- Confidence to expand your business without impacting productivity
- Creates a culture of continuous improvement
This all sounds great, but where to begin? How do you achieve these outcomes with Lean Six Sigma?
Lean Six Sigma tools and concepts are open source and you can learn a lot by simply Googling it. I’ve also compiled a Lean Library, a collection of powerful books and resources on the subject.
Engineering Possibilities was created to make a difference for small to medium businesses with process transformation. With that commitment, I’ve designed a Lean Business Assessment to capture the Current State of your business processes and identify a customized pathway to transform your business into a lean operation. For smaller organizations, I created the Lean Entrepreneur Program, a 12 week program that focuses on solving the problems behind your biggest headaches as an entrepreneur and jumpstarts the lean transformation of your business. I also offer Lean Coaching and Training programs for organizations of all sizes.
Finally, I invite you to join the next session of my free 60 minute Lean Masterclass – Business Performance Breakthrough: 5 Simple Steps to Free your Business from the 8 Deadly Wastes and Instantly Save Money. Register here.