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I recently started a class preparing me for the Green Belt certification in the Six Sigma methodology that is being put on by the American Society of Quality (ASQ). In the first week, a general description of Six Sigma was given as a means to use statistical methods to uncover and remove the causes of variation in manufacturing in order to reduce the defect rate. Lean manufacturing is the reduction of waste rather than variation, and the two are often used in conjunction to reduce costs and therefore increase revenues for a company.

Having worked at Japanese companies before, I asked our instructor Bob Mehta about the Toyota Way and how it differs from Lean Six Sigma. He said that in reality, both the Toyota Way and Lean Six Sigma can ultimately trace the origins of many of their key ideas to the pioneers of quality W. Edward Deming and Joseph M. Juran.

It is a simplification to say that The Toyota Way is preferred by Japanese companies mainly because it was developed by the Japanese company Toyota, and Six Sigma is preferred by American companies mainly because it was developed by Motorola, but he said there is some truth to this statement.

Sometimes it is hard to get Japanese companies interested in Six Sigma methodology because they use the Toyota Way methodology, he said. The opposite is true to a lesser extent regarding American companies being willing to look into the Toyota Way methodology. Much of the reluctance comes from many of its key concepts being expressed in their Japanese original such as kaizen (incremental improvement). But he did say that more and more of these Japanese terms are being used in American and other businesses, showing that they do have an impact on the quality community here.

And certainly the Six Sigma concept of using Green Belt, Black Belt, and other such designations for certification in the methodology are obviously derived from the martial arts, which is a big part of Japanese culture (although not strictly limited to Japanese culture, of course).

He did go on to say that many South Korean companies are adapting versions of the Toyota Way because of some similarities in culture between the Japanese and the Koreans (although cultural rivalry makes them sometimes loathe to admit it). The real challenge he sees is not the inability of the Japanese and the Americans to accept each other’s quality methodology, but to see how well the Chinese adapt the quality methodology embodied in the Toyota Way and/or Six Sigma. Their culture is very different from that of Japan and could be said to be closer in some ways to that of the United States.  This subject of cultural dimensions and their effect on quality management will be discussed further when we get to chapter 3 and the discussion of the ideas of Prof. Geert Hofstede.

In the meanwhile, he said just be on the lookout for ideas within Six Sigma appearing in different guises under other methodologies.

It was a fascinating discussion, and I wanted to relate it in this blog post for future reference as a subject to come back to.

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