Background and History of Lean Six Sigma Essay

Quality and productivity play an important role in manufacturing and construction. The success of any organization depends on its ability to ensure the highest quality at the lowest cost (Taghizadegan, 2006).
Productivity is associated with “the capability of a process to transform inputs into outputs in an effective and efficient manner”. Quality and productivity enable organizations reach global market by considering customer expectation and satisfaction i.e. high quality, low cost and on-time delivery (Ehrlich, 2002).
Quality
Control charts and statistical process control (SPC) are two concepts associated with quality that were developed in the 1920s by Walter Shewhart at Western Electric. SPC became popular in U.S. businesses in the 1970s following its success in Japanese manufacturing applied by Dr. W. Edwards Deming; a statistician at Bell Labs Engineer (Taylor, 2009).
Subsequently, Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) were developed in the 1980s. TQM gained global popularity following the achievement of Malcolm Baldridge Quality Award and Demming Quality Award (Basu, 2009). It was a natural outgrowth from SPC, which focused on a less structured approach, and consisted of principles of quality and process improvement methodologies. BPR on the other hand, encouraged starting over, and completely discarding the old process.
In the early 1980s, TQM and SPC evolved into Six Sigma; first introduced by Mikel Harry, at the Motorola Corporation. Consequently, Motorola Corporation won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1986, based on its success of Six Sigma (El-Haik, 2006).
By late 1990s, Six Sigma was established by the former CEO, Jack Welch, of General Electric Corporation. Six Sigma employs many quality problem-solving tools such as Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC). These tools assist, by eliminating waste, as well as organizing and simplifying work processes (George, 2003).
Productivity
In the 1920s, the Ford production system of cars was developed on the basis of Toyota production system (TPS) of Toyota Motor Corporation (El-Haik, 2006). Prior to that, car manufacturing was “job shop”, meaning they were assembled one at a time by hand (Taylor, 2009). The concept of TPS expanded to Japan by the Toyota family in 1950s (Meisel et. al., 2007).
Later on, TPS bonded with Just-in-time (JIT) production philosophies and developed into Lean, which was popularized after 1973. The purpose of Lean is to reduce waste and cycle time of the process (George, 2003). “Lean enterprise” is a broad term given to Lean program indicating its vast scope of application, ranging from manufacturing to embracing the entire organization (Alukal, 2003).

In the 1980s, Motorola believed that producing better quality products decreases the cost, because it results in greater customer satisfaction and thus higher profitability (Taghizadegan, 2006).
Hence, towards the end of 1990s, a combination of Lean and Six Sigma was developed and subsequently implemented in many manufacturing companies (as shown in figure 1). Integrating both disciplines result in reduction of time and waste due to Lean principles, and decrease in process variability, by using Six Sigma (Meisel et. al., 2007). This business strategy was mainly designed to eliminate waste, minimize process variation, increase velocity and increase customer satisfaction (Tennant, 2001).