10 Improvement Opportunities for Lean Six Sigma

Organizations big and small, for profit and not, benefit from the continuous improvement tools and techniques of Lean Six Sigma. No matter the challenges an organization faces—from customer service to manufacturing to cost overruns—Lean Six Sigma projects are highly likely to solve those challenges. Ten improvement opportunities that are well-suited for Lean Six Sigma projects are outlined below.

  1. Customer Retention: Determine customer retention rates and improve on retaining current customers.
  2. New Customer Acquisition: Focus on improving new customer acquisition processes. Current (or “as is”) processes tend to be a mix between manual and automated, which sometimes is inefficient and frustrating for new customers.
  3. Automation Optimization: Automate processes to increase efficiency—but only after conducting process analysis. Newly automated processes often create errors or exceptions that require other manual rework. Lean Six Sigma projects focus on analyzing the process activity steps to eliminate waste and optimize quality improvements prior to implementing automation.
  4. Product or Service Optimization: Add the rigor of Lean Six Sigma in evaluating products/services offered to customers, with an emphasis on improving the products/services that are most important to customers (often multiple projects).
  5. Customer Service Optimization: Determine the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service, often through multiple Lean Six Sigma projects.
  6. Vendor Management: Review external vendor contract terms, processes, etc., for consistency to reduce errors.
  7. Cash Management: Implement best practices for vendor management,
  8. Back Office Optimization: Focus on back-office efficiency and effectiveness—an effort that typically involves multiple Lean Six Sigma projects.
  9. Marketing Optimization: Add the rigor of Lean Six Sigma to marketing efforts and strive for measurable results.
  10. Employee Retention: Determine employee retention rates and improve on retaining employees as training new employees is expensive and time consuming.

Consider the Lean Six Sigma opportunities here (and more!) to accelerate Operational Excellence and reach business goals. Acuity Institute is ready to help with a full-suite of Lean Six Sigma training programscoaching services, and toolkits that guide projects from start to finish.

Contact Acuity Institute today to learn more about how Acuity Institute and Lean Six Sigma drive continuous improvement to achieve business results.