Interview with Steve Jobs made in the 1990s

He covers some of the core principles of Lean Six Sigma ( without him necessarily knowing it !)
1. Listening to Voice of the Customer
2. Quality is about the product or service being delivered being fit for purpose, free from defects and delivered on time ... it is defined by what your customers think about your products
3. Empowerment and respect for your workers as problem solvers and belief in their creative capacity to improve your processes.

Who is Lean Six Sigma Training Ltd ?

Lean Six Sigma Training Ltd is an IASSC Accredited Training Organization with both online and classroom based training courses in Lean Six Sigma methodology, tools & techniques to businesses and individuals in the North of England, Switzerland and the United States. Our training follows the ISO-13053 and ISO-18404 guidelines for Lean Six Sigma.

Lean focuses on value through the relentless elimination of waste and acceleration in the velocity of processes. Its origins can be traced to Henry Ford of Ford Motor Company and Taiichi Ohno of Toyota. Value is defined in terms of what is important to the customer. Value-add work is something your customer is willing to pay for. For example, does the task add a desired function or feature to the product or service? Or does the task enable a competitive advantage (faster delivery, fewer defects, lower price)? Non-value work, or waste, includes activities the customer is not willing to pay for.

There are eight commonly known forms of waste that can be remembered using the acronym DOWNTIME: Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-Essential Processing, Transportation, Inventory (too much or too little), Motion, and Employee Creativity. Increasing the velocity of processes is not about working faster, but speeding up the entire end-to-end process or lead time. Think of lead time as the time it takes once you order a book from Amazon to the time you receive the book.

Six Sigma is a well defined, customer focused management system that strives for the delivery of near-perfect products or services. Six Sigma's goals are to reduce defects and variation so that processes are more consistent and predictable. Originated by Motorola in the 1980s, Six Sigma translates into 99.9997 percent quality or yield. Dial tone of traditional landline phones, for example, was designed to be available 99.9997 percent of the time. Like Lean, Six Sigma places the customer first. It embraces data to make sound decisions. What has made Six Sigma so popular is the money it has saved companies. According to Praveen Gupta, "Companies have reported saving in the billions of dollars. No other methodology comes close to Six Sigma for savings."