Some Practical Issues in the Application of Lean Six Sigma to Service Systems

Six Sigma as a quality improvement framework has gained considerable popularity in the past two decades. Its extension Lean Six Sigma has also been embraced by many organizations for improvement of quality and business competitiveness. One important factor for the popularity of Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma is their potential for improving service systems, in contrast to the conventional perceptions that only manufacturing systems can benefit from statistics-based methodologies. There are however a number of issues related to the nature of service systems that must be resolved before the full benefits of Lean Six Sigma can be realized. In this paper, these issues are discussed from a practical point of view from three angles: analytical, organizational, and personal. Awareness of the existence of such issues, if not the answers to all of them, is a pre-requisite to effective adoption of Lean Six Sigma tools