Bryan Carey

A Lean Six Sigma program – like all change in an organization – is a dynamic process and needs to be systematically and objectively reviewed for opportunities to improve. Continuous process improvement is applicable to the Lean Six Sigma deployment in the same way it is to other processes in the organization. Even companies with several years […]

Recently, a large-scale financial services company recently wanted to reengineer the process for its entire customer services organization, including people, process and technology. This company had, during the last two years, trained many Black Belts and Green Belts. It attempted to use Six Sigma methodology as the primary method of introducing customer-focused process improvement to […]

The ultimate goal of any Lean Six Sigma program is to achieve operation and execution excellence, which can only come about through a well-thought-out and executed deployment governance framework. A governance framework enables an organization to more rapidly implement positive change by establishing team structure, focusing on knowledge transfer and enabling people. With this framework, […]

Undertaking a process reengineering initiative without a business intelligence team introduces a significant risk to the project’s success. Business intelligence refers to technologies and practices for the collection, integration, analysis and presentation of business information; sometimes, it also refers to the information itself. The purpose of business intelligence is to support better business decision-making, especially […]

Through the years, there have been many different notions about what business process reengineering (BPR) is and how successful it has been as a process improvement approach. In the early 1990s, Michael Hammer and James Champy authored a best-selling book, Reengineering the Corporation, in which they promoted that sometimes radical redesign and reorganization of a […]

The new millennium brought a great deal of change in the marketplace. As the financial scandals of the 1990s came to light, new regulations were drafted and put into place to avoid such occurrences in the future. U.S. financial institutions must comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which came on the heels of the Enron scandal, […]

As the Lean and Six Sigma evolution makes its way throughout the financial services industry and organizations make decisions on how to best spend training dollars, an interesting trend is emerging. Many companies looking at ways to more broadly incorporate Lean and Six Sigma into their cultures are finding that a general knowledge across the […]

Many of the attendees at a recent Lean Six Sigma conference were investigating how to start a Lean and Six Sigma program in their organization. Most were very excited about Lean and Six Sigma and how it could help them introduce process improvement and customer focus to their organizational cultures. Of course, some also were […]

Companies new to Six Sigma need an agreed-upon, easily communicated picture of current processes (“as is” state). Building a SIPOC diagram is a good starting point.

The Lean Six Sigma deployment climate has evolved from one of training internal resources as experts on implementing process improvement projects to a progressive and forward-thinking collective effort facilitating cultural change in an organization. Historically, with a few exceptions in large companies, most financial services organizations are behind in terms of adapting formal, continuous improvement […]

While it is essential for a company to create familiarity with Lean and Six Sigma disciplines by training employees, it is even more important to integrate Lean Six Sigma into the company change culture. Lean Six Sigma should be a key component of the organization’s change infrastructure supporting all projects and change initiatives from the […]

All practitioners of Six Sigma – even those new to the methodology – are aware of the basic DMAIC roadmap. The starting point for every Six Sigma program is to explain the acronym and to teach the common principles of DMAIC. “Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control” becomes the mantra for new Green Belts and […]

Many times when Lean and Six Sigma are introduced to an executive management team, there will be an individual who makes the statement: “This is just common sense. Why do we need to go through all this methodology, training and the statistics stuff to execute a simple project?” A large segment of thought leaders in […]

Being at the focal point in the cultural migration of executing change using Lean Six Sigma, deployment leaders/deployment Champions have many obstacles and opportunities to deal with. Strange as it might seem, the people who may be pushing the hardest for the results inherent in Lean Six Sigma deployments are the same ones who can […]

During recent decades, a number of different methodologies have evolved to help organizations improve quality, speed and efficiency, and better serve their customers. Manufacturing businesses have concentrated primarily on the ISO system, a series of increasingly tough manufacturing benchmarks and requirements developed by the International Standards Organization, and Lean manufacturing (originally known as the Toyota […]

Answering two fundamental questions can help an organization honestly assess its readiness for adopting a Lean Six Sigma culture.

It may seem un-Six Sigma-like to use art concepts in a discussion of Lean Six Sigma and the merger of two large financial institutions. But in fact, any serious approach to integrating two complex organizations can benefit from thinking in terms of art as well as science.