Takt Time Analysis in Lean Six Sigma: From Conventional to Integration

Abstract

Lean Six Sigma offers a comprehensive roadmap, tools and technique for continuous business process improvement. Principally, Lean Six Sigma integrates Lean’s principle of “value” and “speed” with Six Sigma’s “consistency” (i.e. variation reduction) concept into the DMAIC (Design, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) framework. The integration of Lean and Six Sigma advances the pace of business process improvement. Conceptually, Lean and Six Sigma must be applied side by side from both management (i.e. soft practices) and technical (i.e. hard practices) perspectives. However, empirical research found that prior studies on Lean Six Sigma tends to focus on the study of integration from the soft perspective, such as exploring and confirming the determinants for Lean Six Sigma success as well as the application of Lean Six Sigma processes within varies business environments. There is lack of study on the integration of Lean Six Sigma from hard perspective. Hence, the concept of how Lean and Six Sigma tools could be integrated remains ambiguous because there are no standard guideline that available. As such, based on a Lean Six Sigma project(of minimizing new students registration cycle time)that conducted in one of local private university as single case study, this paper explores how Lean and Six Sigma tools could be integrated based on Lean Six Sigma principle, with the focus on a Lean’s tool, namely “Takt Time Analysis”. Finding from the study suggested that Takt Time Analysis could be expanded from “Lean-based” tools to as “Lean Six Sigma tool” by including process variation and process capability as parameters for analysis. The finding as well as the LSS based Takt Time Analysis methodology developed in this study has descriptive value in terms of studying the integration of Lean and Six Sigma tools that govern continuous business process improvement via Lean Six Sigma.