Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma helps clients achieve operational speed, quality, cost reduction and customer satisfaction in the delivery of products and services – a key ingredient to achieve high performance and sustain competitive advantage in businesses and governmental organizations. We help clients address strategic priorities and transform operations by removing waste and driving high-quality business processes through the integration of the proven improvement methodologies of Lean (Speed) and Six Sigma (Quality).

In our experience, operating excellence is a key global driver of economic profit with analysis revealing that 30-80% of the costs in a service business are pure waste. Eliminating waste not only reduces costs, but more importantly allows a business to become faster and much more responsive to its customers, driving revenue growth. Our Lean Six Sigma services drive broad cultural change, create a common operations language and place great emphasis on creating the internal capability required for continuous improvement.

Accenture enhanced its long-standing operations and strategy expertise with the 2007 acquisition of George Group, a recognized market leader in process, operational and business transformation, process strategy and pioneers of Lean Six Sigma, whose capabilities and offerings form the foundation of this new practice.

We are the market leader in applying Lean Six Sigma to service and manufacturing organizations. George Group (at the core of the practice) was the first consulting firm to combine the powerful approaches of Lean (Speed) and Six Sigma (Quality). Our practice helps clients achieve process-focused business transformation across the full value chain of organizations (not just manufacturing), combining this process improvement methodology with efficient process discipline to reduce delivery times, lower costs, create flexibility and increase customer satisfaction. We have established a reputation for excellence in complex, global engagements and offer our highly advanced methodology in 13 languages.

Why Lean Six Sigma:

• Delivers operational speed, quality, cost reduction, and customer satisfaction.
• Identifies drivers of economic profit and shareholder value to create project portfolio.
• Drives broad cultural change and creation of a common language.
• Builds organizational capability to create and sustain a process-performance advantage.

Lean Six Sigma teams help executives explore and address a variety of business questions:

• How do we identify high value projects that will contribute to improved financial performance?
  
  
• How can Lean Six Sigma be applied to our services company and service-based processes?
  
  
• We want to implement Lean Six Sigma in our organization, but how can we get buy-in from the internal groups we work with so that we can implement and work together?
  
  
• We have very specific financial goals. Can Lean Six Sigma help take us there?
  
  
• How will speed and quality give us competitive advantage?
  
  
• Can Lean Six Sigma help me execute on my strategy?

Lean Six Sigma execution
Our highly experienced teams apply Lean Six Sigma methodologies and execution skills to projects as a stand-alone service, in parallel with broader transformation initiatives or as part of an ‘issues based’ deployment. In addition, some companies struggle with dedicating sufficient full-time resources to achieve the breakthrough results that Lean Six Sigma is capable of delivering. Our experienced resources can be brought in on a short-term basis to jump-start profitability or to supplement areas of the business where resources are tightly constrained.

Lean Six Sigma global deployment
Our engagement teams work with organizations on improvement initiatives to clarify specific issues that create interactions and intersections among strategy, policy, mission, process and organization. We leverage our prime value chain methodology, which focuses on the major activities that make up a company’s core value proposition. Through effective strategy deployment our teams focus in on specific corporate pain points with Lean Six Sigma principles to address issue-based initiatives and identify the best areas for Lean Six Sigma improvement opportunity.

Rapid improvement & Kaizen
Our distinctive ‘speed-to-results’ project selection and prioritization approach helps clients focus their efforts on the most promising organizational improvement opportunities. It is designed to engage all levels of the organization to effect a change in culture that embraces process excellence. When integrated with Lean Kaizen events, clients are able to achieve unprecedented speed-to-results and organizational buy-in.

Learn more about how we’ve helped clients and about our capabilities

• Executing Lean Six Sigma projects
• Project Execution Initiative Jump-Starts Transportation Company on Path to High Performance