“Is Lean Six Sigma just for a large company?” sometimes people ask me such question. My answer is always “No” because the Lean Six Sigma bestows great benefits not only to a large company but to a small company also. Actually many small companies have applied the Lean Six Sigma and shown great performance in their success.
Indeed, the Six Sigma was developed by Motorola, and GE applied the Six Sigma to their entire business and made their great success. Nowadays, many large companies in U.S. and other countries are using the Lean Six Sigma. So people believe that the Lean Six Sigma is just for a large company.
But the world of Lean Six Sigma has changed in these decades or so. Nowadays, wide variety sizes of company, wide variety kinds of industry, and wide variety kinds of application are using the Lean Six Sigma.
Why does the Lean Six Sigma not ask the company size?
First, the Lean Six Sigma is simply a framework for a problem-solving regardless of company size and industry. Second, the Lean Six Sigma solves a problem per project.
The Lean Six Sigma setups a project for each problem-solving. The Lean Six Sigma is a pretty project oriented framework. Although a large company could have a large-scaled and complicated problem. Such problem can be decomposed to many smaller-scaled and simpler problems. The decomposed problems could be very similar to the problems in a small company. The Lean Six Sigma could setup a projects to solve such small problems. Therefore, if the Lean Six Sigma has a difference between a large company and a small company, it could be the number of projects in the company.
If there is another difference between a large company and a small company, it could be the burden – financially and technically – when the company implements the Lean Six Sigma at first time.
When implementing the Lean Six Sigma to a company, the company needs to invest money, time, and human resources through trainings, consultants, software, etc. A large company could pay for the investments easily, but a small company. For a small company, the decision for the investments is very hard.
The Lean Six Sigma also cannot guarantee the company’s success 100%. The Lean Six Sigma just increases the probability of company’s success. Therefore, the company which implemented the Lean Six Sigma could be failed because the probability of company’s success is never be 100% with the Lean Six Sigma. That makes the decision for investment in the Lean Six Sigma harder.
A good news is that the threshold of Lean Six Sigma investment became much lower than before. There are many books and research papers are published, many case-studies are available on internet, there are many free tools and templates available as well. Regardless of company size, the information for the Lean Six Sigma is available everywhere. The cost of training and consulting became much lower than before as well.
Nowadays, the Lean Six Sigma is a framework which leads a company to be success regardless the company size.