Watch the Process Mining Café session now to learn how. For organizations who have picked the low-hanging fruits with Lean and for whom Six Sigma with their rigid statistical approach is a bridge too far, process mining provides a way to dig deeper and unlock the next level of improvements. Process mining can be combined with both methodologies and sits somehow in the middle. When obvious waste is eliminated, one needs to move to a more sophisticated data-driven approach such as Six Sigma. Lean is often used for processes driven by knowledge workers, where there are still a lot of opportunities to improve. You need domain knowledge and an understanding of the goals of the process to know where to focus your analysis. Furthermore, looking only at data is like searching a needle in the haystack. Often, the actual root causes are not in the data at all. And finally, most statistical hypothesis tests are not applicable for processes with a large variation because they assume that the data is normally distributed, which is often not the case.Īt the same time, data is not everything. Furthermore, you don’t need statistical measuring if you have the complete data. For example, data does not need to be manually collected anymore because it is already there. We also discussed where process mining changes the traditional approach. In the café, we showed how process mining fits both into Lean and Six Sigma based on a concrete example.
With Lean Six Sigma, both methods are merged and often used with other tools like the fishbone diagram, asking 5x why, hypothesis tests, etc. Six Sigma focuses on defects and has a more statistical approach. Lean has the goal to create flow and focuses on eliminating waste. Lean Six Sigma is the composition of two methodologies: Lean and Six Sigma. If you missed the live broadcast or want to re-watch the café, you can now watch the recording here. Six Sigma is aimed at improving quality – Understanding the customer quality needs, Identifying and removing the root causes of defects in products and services, using a data driven and systematic approach to pinpoint and resolve critical problems.As a companion to our Combining Lean Six Sigma and Process Mining series, Rudi and I discussed how process mining fits into Lean Six Sigma in the last Process Mining Café. Lean is focussed on improving ‘flow’ – efficiently delivering what customers want, eliminating waste, identifying and removing bottlenecks and constraints, and ultimately making processes more customer focussed, responsive, and delivering a better customer experience. Lean Six Sigma is today’s most widely used Process Improvement Methodology, combining the “best of the best” from approaches proven around the world over the last 30 years.
Many tens of thousands of organisations around the World in all sectors and of all sizes are using the Lean Six Sigma method to deliver unprecedented returns and to build a new performance culture throughout the business focussed on delivering what the customer really wants.