Voice of the Customer

We need to listen to the Voice of Customer to understand their pain points and to identify the areas where we can improve. Normally the pain points include defects, delayed deliveries, nonadherence to Turn Around Time, increased cost, etc. We also need to listen to the Voice of Business, which indicates the improvement necessary to run the operations sustainably and improve profitability.

We also need to listen to the Voices of Employees – Employees are the internal customers of their upstream processes. We will be able to identify improvement opportunities after listening to all these three voices. To improve the processes, we can employ two methodologies – Lean, which will help in identifying and eliminating wastes in our processes, and Six Sigma, which will help in reducing the defects by reducing the variability in our processes. Lean will help in simplifying our processes and making them efficient whereas Six Sigma will help in improving the quality of our processes and products and make them perfect.?

A combination of Lean and Six Sigma is now proving to be a very effective Process improvement methodology in organizations. Thus, deploying Lean Six Sigma projects in an organization will help in achieving customer results and improved profitability.