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8/1/2025
What Is the Meaning of Lean Six Sigma?
Bisk Amplified
August 1, 2025
Lean Six Sigma combines the principles, techniques and tools of Lean and Six Sigma to help organizations improve processes, eliminate waste, increase productivity, and improve products. While the two methodologies developed separately, many practitioners and organizations find it helpful to combine the two.
To do so successfully, it helps to understand the benefits of combining the two methodologies, as well as understand what both are attempting to accomplish. In the case of Lean, the focus is on waste reduction and incorporating customer feedback quickly into product and services design and delivery. In Six Sigma, the focus is on eliminating variance in processes that can lead to errors and defective products.
This commitment to understanding the methodologies and what they can do for an organization is what makes implementing Lean Six Sigma worth it.
By integrating Lean and Six Sigma, organizations have a better chance at achieving greater improvements in quality, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Some of the benefits of combining the two include the following.
By using Lean Six Sigma, organizational leaders take a holistic approach to process improvement by addressing both waste and defect reduction. By addressing both areas, they address the efficiency and effectiveness of processes while also ensuring that products better meet consumer demands.
Improvements do not occur alone or during one six-month period in a business' long lifespan. Business leaders must create a culture of continuous process improvement, increasing the chances of sustained success.
Both Lean and Six Sigma are data-driven methodologies that rely on statistical analysis to identify and solve problems, rather than intuition or guesswork. By integrating the two, organizations can take data-driven decision-making into more areas of an operation.
One of the main focuses of Lean is on the Voice of the Customer and meeting consumer demands, while Six Sigma focuses on significantly reducing product defects. Taken together, they both improve a company’s ability to identify and meet customer needs.
The core idea of Lean is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Lean focuses on creating value for customers by first identifying their needs, and then analyzing business operations to ensure that everything that takes place adds value to the customer. If it doesn’t, then it is eliminated.
Lean focuses on eliminating wasteful actions in eight key areas.
Lean also focuses on process flow, ensuring that value-adding tasks take place efficiently and smoothly. The goal is to produce products when customers need them and in the quantity they require. This is known as the pull system, in contrast to the traditional manufacturing push system.
The tools and techniques of Six Sigma seek to improve the quality of processes and products by identifying and eliminating operational variations that can lead to defects and errors in products and services. The term "Six Sigma" refers to a level of quality that is statistically defined as 3.4 defects per million opportunities.
Organizations use Six Sigma to identify the root causes of problems, correcting them to improve overall process performance. The most popular system used in Six Sigma is DMAIC, an acronym for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.
Taken together, these two proven methodologies can improve organizational performance and result in products and services that better meet customer needs. It’s the reason Lean Six Sigma continues to remain popular decades after the development of both methodologies.
