Building Competitive Advantage through Lean Six Sigma Operations

In today’s hypercompetitive business environment, operational excellence is one of the key factors in the success of a firm. Yet, an operations strategy is not a carefully assembled folder sitting on an executive's shelf. Rather, it is a highly adaptive and continually shifting base of knowledge that becomes an integral part of the firm and provides guideposts for decision-making and direction setting. Clearly, product and service firms that have achieved operations and manufacturing excellence understand this reality. Realizing many companies’ need for guidance in this process, we have developed the Building Competitive Advantage through Lean Six Sigma Operations Program and it’s intense curriculum.

By cutting through the rhetoric and debunking the last decade's fads, this program provides realistic implements and ideas for building sound operating strategies. Executives can discover ways to effectively reinvigorate their organizations and improve performance from the fundamental minutia up to the most crucial deals. These practical tools and concepts present the necessary building blocks for maintaining a competitive advantage and providing sustainable growth. The program exposes participants to examples of operations and manufacturing excellence in product or service firms worldwide.

Generate a sustainable advantage in cost, quality, speed, and customer service to achieve world-class performance. Using real-world case studies, group workshops, and animated computer simulation models, you explore a framework for diagnosing, improving, and designing effective processing systems and for identifying leverage points with the greatest impact on the bottom line. This framework includes the Business Process Flow Paradigm, which examines an organization as a collection of business flows with a critical link between operational drivers and strategic success. You will analyze a set of “laws” representing the core science of lean operation—which describe the underlying behavior of manufacturing and service systems, including the fundamental relationships between performance measures such as throughput, work-in-progress, flow time, and process variability. Taken together, these tools provide a firm scientific foundation for the practice of lean six sigma operations.

Course Curriculum

The Lean Six Sigma Operations program combines educational presentations, productive in-session assignments, and participant collaboration to provide actionable learning. Our training courses are structured to provide practical training and to enable participants to get the most out of their experience. Our format includes:

• Detailed pre-course questionnaires to allow you to tailor the program to address your individual concerns
• Blend of lecture, in-class projects, and participant discussion designed to create the most productive learning environment
• Small class size, allowing for greater interaction among participants and individual contact with the instructors

Participants in this course learn a broad spectrum of operations management strategies, from foundational methodologies to situational blueprints. In-depth analysis of real-world case studies yield an enlightening view of the successful operations of leading companies and provide valuable insights into approaches to creating a high-performance workplace. Executives also learn how to launch programs for revitalizing operations and create an environment centered on learning and knowledge sharing. The Program will provide you with an understanding of the operations planning process, help you create strategies that run parallel with the organization’s overall disposition, and give you the tools to build employee commitment to change and innovation.

In this program, participants will learn:

Day 1:

• Link day-to-day operational details to business strategies
• The Business Process Flows Framework
• Analyze process flows to target improvement efforts

Day 2:

• The Toyota Production System
• Science of Lean and Six Sigma
• Basic Process Dynamics

Day 3:

• Variability Basics
• Managing the Corrupting Influence of Variability
• Push and Pull Production