Variation Is Evil: Reduce It with Six Sigma
Your customers want predictability and reliability. Whenever there is a cost, quality, or lead-time variation from specification, it’s a recipe for disaster. Six Sigma is a powerful tool that identifies and isolates the causes of variation. We will examine how it can be used to help your business save money and deliver a better experience to customers.This week, you will:
- Explore the key objectives of Six Sigma
- Summarize the phases of a Six Sigma project
- Apply Six Sigma tools and techniques to improve outcomes
Discussion
Applying Six SigmaSix Sigma projects are widely used to improve the quality, cost, and time performance of processes, products, and services.Watch the Six Sigma Foundations course and answer the following questions:
- Provide an example of variation in the products or services in your industry and explain how this variation impacts customers.
- Select one specific Six Sigma concept or tool seen in the Six Sigma Foundations course in LinkedIn Learning that you found to be most useful.
- Explain why you selected this particular concept or tool. How easy or difficult would it be to apply this in your industry?
- Support your responses with specific references to the Six Sigma Foundations course.
Post your initial response by Wednesday, midnight of your time zone, and reply to at least 2 of your classmates’ initial posts by Sunday, midnight of your time zone.
1st person to respond to
Melaine,
Good evening Professor and class –
Healthcare is one of the industries that register high variations in the provision of services. That being said, various impacts are brought about by this variation. One of these is the increase in poor services. Over the years, Americans have posted a multitude of complaints regarding the quality of services they receive in healthcare facilities. In some cases, patients lose their lives owing to laxity or denial of services. The second impact is brought out through the manifestation of healthcare inequalities. For Americans, accessing healthcare is a fundamental right. Unfortunately, the impoverished and those belonging to minority groups are constantly subjected to poor-quality healthcare services owing to costs and other prevalent complexities.
Standardizing healthcare services is not a walk in the park. One of the Six Sigma tools that can help address this variation is value stream mapping. In this case, I chose this tool because it can go a long way in mapping a patient’s path to treatment and using it to enhance services and reduce delays. According to Marin-Garcia et al. (2021), value stream mapping can also help in prioritizing or championing the patients’ value. To some extent, it would be somewhat easy to apply this tool in healthcare. In this case, there are various tools that can help expedite the process. Among these is the process activity map. This can help avail techniques that can be used to eliminate waste, inconsistencies, and irrationalities (Hines & Rich, 2017). Moreover, it can go a long way in ensuring the provision of high-quality healthcare services inexpensively and easily. However, this tool can also be used with others, such as Kaizen, to enhance outcomes.
Hines, P. & Rich, N. (2017). The seven value stream mapping tools. International journal of operations & production management, 17(1), 46-64.
Marin-Garcia, J.A., Vidal-Carreras, P., & Garcia-Sabater, J.J. (2021). The role of value stream mapping in healthcare services: A scoping review. International journal of environmental research and public health, 18(3), 1-25.
