Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Training teaches you how to improve customer service. It’s implemented by many organizations. Lean Six Sigma focuses on the rate that determines what causes an organization to fail to provide acceptable products or services. In the case of a manufacturing company, Six Sigma works to reduce the number of defective products produced. Green Belt Certification is a professional credential used to improve quality when running organizations, especially process management or manufacturing firms. This article discusses 5 Lean Six Sigma benefits.
What is Lean six sigma?
Lean Six Sigma is a process improvement method designed to eliminate problems, reduce waste and inefficiency, and improve working conditions.
It combines Lean and Six Sigma tools, methods, and principles to improve your organization’s operations.
Lean Six Sigma’s team-oriented approach improves efficiency and profitability for businesses worldwide.
There are three key elements to Lean Six Sigma.
Tools and techniques: A complete set of tools and ways of thinking about things that are used to find problems and solve them.
Process and methodology: A set of steps that organize how the tools for solving a problem are used to make sure that the real causes are found and that a solution is fully put into place.
Mindset and culture: A way of thinking that uses data and processes to reach performance goals and keep getting better.
These three things work well together. Analytical techniques can’t be used well if there isn’t a process for using them and a mindset of always wanting to get better. A process for improvement won’t get the results you want if it doesn’t include the tools and techniques that define the steps of the process and if there isn’t a culture that insists on a systemic, data-based approach to solving problems.
Lastly, a culture that wants to keep getting better will fail if it doesn’t have tools and techniques for analysis or a process or method that can be used to organize and focus the improvement efforts. Luckily, the Lean Six Sigma method for improving a business has all three layers.
Background
Let’s look at how Lean Six Sigma came to be and how its different parts came together to make the process improvement method we know today.
What is continuous improvement?
Continuous improvement as a business strategy and discipline grew out of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor said that business is a series of workflows or processes that work together and need to be managed with data.
In the 1930s, Walter Shewhart came up with a set of management practices for controlling processes and making improvements all the time. Taylor’s ideas about how business should flow and how to use data formed the basis for these disciplines. Shewhart’s work is the basis for the engineering and management fields of Quality Assurance and Quality Control, which are used by most organizations today.
Edward Deming was one of Shewhart’s students and followers. After World War II, Deming used these ideas to turn the Japanese auto industry into a global quality and engineering powerhouse.
What is Lean?
As part of the Toyota Production System, which was based on the work of Shewhart and Deming, Lean was created at Toyota. Deming had worked with Toyota, and the company’s ways of running were based on the ideas he taught. The main goal of Lean is to get rid of waste, which is also its name. In fact, a good way to describe the Lean approach is as “a set of tools that help find and get rid of waste over time.”
If a company, like Toyota, does large-scale, high-volume production, then a process that makes waste means that the company makes large-scale, high-volume waste. No business would want to do this. The Lean method looks at how a business process works by using tools.
Five principles of lean manufacturing
- Value: What a customer thinks is important in a product or service is what determines its value, not what the people who make or sell the product or service think is important.
- Value Stream:The set of business activities and steps that go into making and delivering products and services to customers. Rather than looking at each step on its own, you should look at how they all fit together.
- Flow:How much waste and inefficiency slow down the flow of activities that add value to the customer.
- Pull:The extent to which the value stream only handles products and services that customers want, instead of making something and hoping that someone will want it.
- Perfection: The continuous assessment of value stream performance to find and improve the value created and delivered to the customer, instead of resisting changes that make the process of creating and delivering customer value better.
Three types of waste
Using the terminology of the Toyota Production System, the Lean methodology seeks to eliminate three types of waste:
- Muda: Non-value added work – pure waste.
- Mura: Unpredictable flow variation necessitates compensation elsewhere in the system.
- Muri:Overburdening resources beyond their normal rated capacity – stresses and degrades resources to the point where they are unable to perform their normal workload.
As both of these lists demonstrate, Lean principles can be applied to any business process or operation, not just manufacturing. It is now employed in literally every function and industry.
Green Belt Certification.
Why learn Lean Six Sigma?
In 2016, the World Economic Forum polled more than 350 executives from nine different industries around the world to start figuring out how technological progress will change the job market.
In September 2018, they made changes to the original report The Future of Jobs to focus on the next five years, from 2018 to 2022. Here is where you can get the PDF.
So, here’s what I mean. If you want to stay relevant and make more money in your career, you should focus on meta-skills like being able to think critically about business and always looking for ways to add more value to companies and customers.
One of the most important meta-skills is being able to figure out how to solve problems and do everything you do well. Change is only getting faster, so problems won’t go away.
Not only will we have to use new technologies like AI, RPA, and Blockchain in our businesses, but we will also have to change how we manage and organize our people to get the most out of them.
Almost all of the skills listed in the Future of Jobs report depend on the ability to break down what businesses do now and find new ways to work, think, and act in order to give customers more and more “customer value.”
Lean Six Sigma Certification Benefits
First of all, businesses today compete in a “value creation economy,” and the whole point of Lean is to learn how to make more value with less. Second, MBA programs have been teaching for years that operational excellence is not enough. However, new research from HBR on operational excellence shows that the best-in-class processes are hard to copy or imitate because they are so demanding. Amazon comes to mind. Third, HBR research showed that there is a strong link between operational excellence and strategic success measures.
So, great leadership will no longer be enough for businesses that don’t pay attention to how their processes affect their results.
Is it worth getting Lean Six Sigma certified?
Every business tries to change and get better at what it does all the time. Lean Six Sigma is one of the most important parts of transformation programs today, and Black Belts and Master Black Belts are at the center of those programs.
The biggest benefit of Lean Six Sigma training and certification is that it makes you better able to help drive, support, and lead strategic projects on a local level as well as help redesign whole organizations. From a business point of view, it helps improve your bottom line, gets your employees more involved, and helps you serve your customers better.
So who should go through Lean Six Sigma Certification?
There are three main levels of Lean Six Sigma Certification: Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt, Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.
The Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt Certification is an introductory course that focuses on finding ways to improve processes and making them better by getting rid of “waste” in processes. Visit the course page to see a full list of the benefits of the Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt Course.
So, what are the benefits of getting a Green Belt in Lean Six Sigma? The Green Belt level is the basic level of knowledge that every manager from the first level up to the senior level should have. It uses tools and ideas that are more complicated, but it gives people the skills they need to improve cross-functional processes in organizations. Find out more about what the Lean Six Sigma Green Belt course can do for you here.
The last step is to take the Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Course, which teaches how to run complex business process improvements and change the way people already work. With more data, more data analysis, more stakeholders, bigger teams, and more complicated processes, all organizations today need a small amount of Black Belt skills. Find out what the Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Course is all about.
Lastly, there is a level called Master Black Belt, which is more focused on using Lean Six Sigma strategically across organizations. This could involve aligning strategic project initiatives, helping senior teams integrate Lean Thinking across the business, and building the capability through lean training programs.
But now let’s look at the principles and meta-skills you would learn.
1. Analytical Thinking and Innovation
As part of the workshop on “Fundamentals of Lean Six Sigma,” there is a strong focus on two important parts. From an analytical thinking point of view, lean and six sigma provide a set of tools that can help break down complex problems into parts that can be handled.
This method makes it easy to find the real causes of problems, which leads to focused improvements that lead to better business processes and performance.
By going over the Lean Startup method, the workshop gives professionals the skills they need to test new products and services quickly in a controlled and cost-effective way by using the Minimum Viable Product method and fast learning loops.
2. Critical Thinking and Analysis
The DMAIC project management structure is a tried-and-true way to solve problems. Before coming up with a solution, the method focuses on the core analysis and evaluation of data to find the root cause(s).
The Lean method teaches people how to use critical process analysis to improve both speed and quality. We have found that when something goes wrong, more than 90% of the time, we blame the people, not the process. But if the process is well thought out, shouldn’t nothing go wrong?
As part of our workshops, you get help and guidance to develop your critical thinking skills so that you can use them in the real world.
3. Complex Problem-Solving
Lean Six Sigma is based on a way of thinking that pushes us to find better ways to create more customer value through continuous improvement. This can only be done by solving problems over and over again.
One of the best things about the best Lean Six Sigma Certification programs is that they have a structured way of learning that shows how to get lean certified through a mix of theory and practice in the real world.
There is a very specific Lean training program to help you learn these skills. It starts with learning the core skills for the Lean Certification, then moves on to the Yellow Belt Lean Six Sigma Certification. Everyone can improve processes and solve day-to-day problems with this level of knowledge.
At the next level of lean six sigma certification, problems that are harder to solve are the main focus. This is the Green Belt Level of Lean Six Sigma. At this level, professionals like you can break down complicated business problems and find ways to work that are faster, better, and less expensive. At this stage, we’re looking for strong business cases, clear project management skills, and the ability to start influencing key senior stakeholders.
Lastly, the Advanced Lean Six Sigma Workshops take the training to the highest level (Black Belt Lean Six Sigma Level, coming soon), where professionals (often called “change-agents”) can run company-wide strategic projects that make big improvements that are important to the company’s success.

4. Leadership and Social Influence
As with any project management job, your success will depend on how well you lead your team and deal with stakeholders. Lean isn’t just about tools and methods; it’s also important to be able to deal with change, which is a skill that everyone needs to work on.
It’s hard, and learning how to deal with change and how teams work will help you become a better leader and have more influence on your team and the business as a whole.
5. Reasoning, Problem-Solving and Ideation
LeanScape is the only company that combines Lean and innovation, because we think that creating customer value will be one of the most important ways for businesses to stand out in the future.
We put these two ideas together in our workshops because we think it’s important for professionals who want to move up in their careers and will need to come up with new services, new products, or just new ideas for customer-focused solutions to problems at some point.
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