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No AI Success Without Lean Six Sigma 🚀

AI promises to transform operations, but only if your processes are already under control. Without clean, consistent data, AI becomes a high-tech amplifier of your existing inefficiencies. 📉 Before you chase algorithms and automation, ask the tough questions: Where are your real bottlenecks? Why is your quality inconsistent? What’s causing downtime? These aren’t just IT problems, they’re process problems. And since the 1980s, Lean Six Sigma has been the go-to framework for fixing them. With DMAIC as your foundation, you don’t just implement AI—you prepare your organization to leverage it strategically. Want AI success? Start with process excellence.

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Cutting profit, the Cost of Poor Quality

A senior leader once told me, “We don’t have a quality issue, our customers never receive defective products.” But here’s the question every Lean Six Sigma professional should ask in return: At what cost? 💸 The Cost of Poor Quality (CoPQ) isn’t just about defects that reach the customer, it’s about the hidden waste embedded in your operations: red tape, rework, and scrap. These issues quietly erode margins, slow down teams, and bury innovation under inefficiency. Want to reveal where profit is leaking? Start with a Value Stream Map. You’ll be amazed at how many “necessary” steps actually add no value at all. Don’t be fooled by a perfect final product. True quality lives in the process, and fixing that process is where the real savings begin.

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The Epic of Lean Six Sigma Terminology

Is it Lean? Is it Six Sigma? Is it Kaizen, Genryou, or TQC? If the language of process improvement feels like a modern-day Tower of Babel, you’re not alone. Despite speaking about the same goals, efficiency, quality, and continuous improvement, we often use wildly different terms to describe them. But behind the jargon lies a fascinating history that shaped what we now call Lean Six Sigma. From Toyota’s Genryou Management and Kaizen in the 1950s, to Motorola’s statistical rigor with Six Sigma in the 1970s, the evolution of continuous improvement reflects a blend of East and West, theory and practice, philosophy and metrics. When the two paths converged in the early 2000s, Lean Six Sigma emerged, not just as a toolkit, but as a way of thinking. This article unpacks that journey, tracing how terms like Kata, DMAIC, and Poka-yoke found their place in modern business vocabulary. Whether you’re a seasoned Black Belt or just beginning to explore process improvement, understanding where these concepts come from helps us use them with greater clarity and purpose. So next time you hear “Lean Six Sigma,” remember, it could’ve been called Genryou Six Sigma. Or even Kaizen DMAIC. The name may be circumstantial, but the impact is anything but.

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