Lean and Six Sigma in daily life

This week’s article is to talk about how we can use tools like Lean and Six Sigma in our daily lives. The first paragraph will give you a brief idea on what the tools of lean and six sigma are. The following two paragraphs will cite some examples on how they can be used in your daily lives. The last paragraph will be a roundup of all that I have talked about. The concepts of lean and six sigma are heavily used by businesses to reduce waste in the form of lost productivity and lost efficiency in their processes and improve their profits. The scopes of utilization of these concepts are unlimited.

What is Lean and what is Six Sigma?
Lean is a concept developed by Toyota to minimize waste in its various forms in their manufacturing process. By waste I do not mean ‘garbage”, Waste is referred to utilization of resources without gaining any significant output. In day to day life, “waste” can be spending your money on things that you do not really need.

Six Sigma is a concept which has evolved from the theories of Statistical quality control. They were discovered by Bill Smith, an engineer in Motorola. Six Sigma merely uses the Define-Measure-Analysis-Improve-Control (DMAIC) model to generate improvement by minimizing variation. One can wonder what is this “variation” that needs to be minimized. “Variation” is merely the practice of doing thing the same things differently. For example, making one cup of tea the Indian way. My sequence of making tea has the following steps :

Pick up the tea vessel and seat it on the coil of the electric stove.
Measure out a half cup of water and half cup milk and pour it into the tea vessel.
Let the water-milk mixture heat for 5 minutes at a temperature setting of 5 on the stove.
Add one spoon of tea powder.
Let the tea boil with the water-milk mixture till you get an even brown color .(This could take 7-9 minutes)
Switch the electric stove off and pour tea into a cup by filtering through a tea filter.

Now even though I know these are the steps I would need to perform to sip a hot cup of tea , the sequence of operations and the settings used varies almost every time I make the tea. I might pour the milk before the water, might use a temperature setting of 7 if I am in a hurry. This is just human nature; we tend to vary even in repetitive tasks.

Now you might think why is that bad? My theory is if we keep things consistent and consciously try to minimize variation we will consume less resource (in terms of money, time availability) and will get better in managing our day to day lives and tackling the challenges that come our way.

How can we use these ideas in our daily lives? We are all crunched for money .So this is the main topic I will attempt to address. I will give you a few questions that I would ask you if you hired me as a Lean sigma consultant to optimize and maximize the utilization of your money.

Let us talk about money first .Money is something that is never enough. The first thing in optimizing your money utilization is knowing what your exact inflows and outflows are. As a Lean sigma consultant I would make a list of all of your inflows on one column and the outflows in the next column. In the outflows column, I would take a long heard look and classify them as Value Added, Non Value Added (Un-necessary) and Non Value added (Necessary). Value added can be things that you absolutely need to pay for like rent, groceries, cell phone bills, savings contribution, and insurance premiums. Non Value added (Necessary) can be credit card payments, other forms of loan payments etc… Non Value Added (Un-necessary) can be impulse purchases at the mall , that must have electronic item that you have been eyeing which is causing you to pay a 24.99% APR and things like that .

Once the classification process is completed .I would urge you to look long and hard at the items you have identified as Non Value Added (Un-necessary) and minimize/eliminate them. If you are able to do this you my friend have taken your first step towards greater peace of mind and less money oriented stress. This was a lean tool to identify what you have classified as Non Value Added (Un-necessary). You have to next use basic analysis to arrive at the root cause of what causes these outflows. Once you have done that you can use the DMAIC model talked about earlier to completely wipe out any future possibilities of having a recurrence of this Non Value Added (Un-necessary) outflow.

So to wrap up, this may seem like a lot of work but to let you in on a secret that is how life is “painful”. Not to get to negative but life is also about discovering and utilizing new tools to make your life easier. This is one of them tools that you can try out. I will be happy to answer any questions from the readers .It is part of my role as a Lean Six Sigma black belt to educate and spread the lean six sigma joy with what little I know.

Thank you and Happy Diwali !!