Contents
This essay is based on the following requirement - - Using the two paragraphs shown below as a starting point, write an essay that demonstrates how both Benchmarking and Lean Six Sigma can be used by organisations to facilitate change in their business processes to enhance and sustain their competitive advantage.
- In your essay you need to discuss the following:
- a. What are Benchmarking and Lean Six Sigma?
- b. How can both be applied to business process change?
- c. How have organisations actually used one or both to improve their processes? (Case Studies)
- d. How could you apply Benchmarking and/or Lean Six Sigma to your current organisation or to an
- organisation you know well to identify business process change improvements?
- “Benchmarking improves performance by identifying and applying best demonstrated practices to operations and sales. Managers compare the performance of their products or processes externally with those of competitors and best-in-class companies and internally with other operations within their own firms that perform similar activities. The objective of Benchmarking is to find examples of superior performance and to understand the processes and practices driving that performance. Companies then improve their performance by tailoring and incorporating these best practices into their own operations—not by imitating, but by innovating.” http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/management-tools-benchmarking.aspx
- Lean Six Sigma is a new business improvement methodology, combining both Lean and Six Sigma methodologies. The goals of Lean are to eliminate waste from processes and increase process speed by focusing on what customers actually consider value and working back from that. Six Sigma is used to eliminate process variation and make process improvements based on the customer definition of quality, by measuring process performance and process change effects. When combined they create a business improvement methodology that can be used for the standardisation and integration of business processes. Importantly, organisations that have adopted the Lean Six Sigma methodology have been seen to be able to deliver goods and services in a cost effective manner, with minimal waste.
Description
A large-scale business operation can have several processes and different activities that collectively work towards a common goal i.e. manufacturing a cost-effective quality product or service (Anderson, 2016). Amongst these processes there might be certain activities which might not perform effectively and not produce maximum quality output (De Vries, 2010). These variations can lead to increase in cost and eventually resulting in producing low-quality products (Wireman, 2014). In order to ensure an efficient process throughout the manufacturing stages, companies have started adopting tools like benchmarking and Six Sigma. This report discusses the significance of benchmarking and Lean Six Sigma in enhancing business processes. The report also discusses the application of Benchmarking and Lean Six Sigma and its effectiveness in some organizations.
