Lessons from Lean Six Sigma failures

Sometimes we learn more from our failures than from our successes.

That mindset helped one student win the best undergraduate paper award at the Society for Industrial and Systems Engineering (SISE) World Conference in October 2017.

Hadir Elsayed is an undergraduate Industrial and Systems Engineering student who spent her summer working on a research project sponsored by the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP). Only 10 students are chosen every year to participate in the LSAMP summer research program, and Elsayed was one of the students who worked at least 30 hours a week for eight weeks as part of this paid summer program (applications are currently open for summer 2018.)

Professor Daryl L. Santos of the Systems Science and Industrial Engineering (SSIE) Department served as her faculty advisor.

The project that Elsayed worked on looked into the implementation of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) in healthcare companies, with a focus on the times when LSS did not work as expected.

Lean Six Sigma is a process-improvement methodology that aims to increase value by improving quality, speed and client satisfaction while reducing costs. It achieves this by merging tools and principles from both Lean — a process to enable better delivery of products and services — and Six Sigma — a plan to achieve stable and predictable results by reducing variation and defects.

Originally, LSS was used by manufacturing companies, but it has since been incorporated into a number of hospitals and healthcare facilities to improve patient experiences.

“While there are many publications of successful implementations of LSS in healthcare, this work is interested in learning from unsuccessful LSS implementation efforts,” Elsayed explains, adding that an understanding of why LSS failed can give companies an idea of how to avoid those pitfalls in their own implementations.

“Based on the research that I did, I found that LSS failed for a variety of reasons, most of which had to do with either a lack of expertise, motivation or organization,” Elsayed says. “Companies have to go all-in with LSS to really see the results.”

Elsayed’s research is a cautionary tale for companies looking to implement LSS without being committed to the program and its ideologies. Elsayed says that for a company to truly see the results that LSS promises, it needs to encourage systemic education about LSS and its successes, develop a deficiency remediation process and set up a metric to measure success.

In fact, one company is already taking the lessons of Elsayed’s research to heart. While working on her research, Elsayed also interned at Lockheed Martin with the Rotary and Mission Systems team in Owego, N.Y. Lockheed Martin gave her a platform to share her research, and she was able to encourage employees and managers to understand the importance of manager support and engagement, education and project selection when it comes to successful implementation of LSS.

Lean Six Sigma courses are a staple of Watson Continuing Education at Binghamton University because of the program’s ability to reduce costs, improve business processes and create value for customers and shareholders. In fact, a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt – Healthcare program is currently being taught by Professor and SSIE Chair Mohammad Khasawneh. Khasawneh will also begin an online Lean Six Sigma Green Belt course on April 30; it is currently open for registration.