José María Berganza García / Lecturer at CMI Higher Education
Lean and Six Sigma were born and grew up in close connection with industrial settings, which is why they are still often associated with factories, assembly lines or statistical process control. Yet that association is far too narrow. A university that takes weeks to process a credit transfer, a hospital with needless waiting times, a company that repeats administrative tasks or a sales department that loses opportunities through poor coordination all have something in common: they all work through processes and can therefore all analyse variation, waste, lead times, errors and value for the user.
Two complementary traditions
Lean Six Sigma combines two complementary traditions. Lean focuses on creating flow and removing activities that consume resources without adding value; Six Sigma brings a discipline aimed specifically at reducing defects and variability through data analysis. Together they make it possible to tackle speed, quality and stability at the same time. A classic indicator helps convey Six Sigma’s statistical ambition: under the usual convention that allows for a 1.5-sigma shift, a process at six sigma equates to roughly 3.4 defects per million opportunities (American Society for Quality, 2023). Not every service needs to reach that level, but the figure illustrates an essential idea: improvement requires measurement.
The DMAIC method (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control) turns that philosophy into a working sequence. Define pins down the problem from the customer’s or user’s point of view; Measure establishes how the process really works; Analyse identifies the causes; Improve tests solutions; and Control stops the process from slipping back. What matters is choosing tools for their usefulness in solving the problem, not to follow a methodological ritual.
Beyond the factory: healthcare and higher education
The evidence shows that its use has spread well beyond manufacturing. In healthcare, a systematic review by Rathi, Vakharia and Shadab (2022) documents the use of Lean Six Sigma to improve efficiency and productivity, while noting that many studies still focus on management rather than clinical processes. In higher education, Gómez-Molina (2022) analysed 68 articles on Lean in universities and identified applications in both academic and administrative processes. Another review of Lean Six Sigma in higher education institutions found projects in academic management, curriculum, services and administration aimed at cutting costs, increasing efficiency and raising stakeholder satisfaction (Guerrero Moreno et al., 2019).
There are also examples of large-scale implementation. Svensson et al. (2015) described a university programme in which some 350 staff received awareness training, 50 trained as Yellow Belts, 150 as Green Belts and seven completed Black Belt training. The figures are interesting because they show that continuous improvement does not depend on specialists alone: it needs an architecture of skills spread across the whole organisation.
Adapt, don’t copy
Bringing Lean Six Sigma into services, however, means avoiding a literal copy of the factory. In an administrative process, “inventory” may be a backlog of pending requests; “rework”, paperwork returned because of errors; and “cycle time”, the number of days between a customer’s request and the response. Value must also be defined differently: cutting costs is not enough if simplification worsens the user experience, safety or quality.
Continuous improvement works when it combines method, data and organisational behaviour. Without leadership, without the involvement of the people who carry out the process and without the discipline to sustain the changes, the tools produce one-off improvements that fade away. So the question is no longer whether Lean Six Sigma works outside industry: the evidence shows that it does. The real question is whether the organisation is willing to look at its processes rigorously enough to tell what genuinely creates value from what has simply always been done that way.
References
- American Society for Quality. (2023). The ASQ Certified Quality Process Analyst Handbook (3rd ed.). ASQ Quality Press.
- Gómez-Molina, D.-L. (2022). Lean management in universities: A systematic literature review. International Journal of Lean Six Sigma, 13(1), 156–177. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLSS-12-2020-0224
- Guerrero Moreno, D. R., Silva Leal, J. A., & Bocanegra-Herrera, C. C. (2019). Revisión de la implementación de Lean Six Sigma en Instituciones de Educación Superior. Ingeniare. Revista Chilena de Ingeniería, 27(4), 652–667. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-33052019000400652
- Rathi, R., Vakharia, A., & Shadab, M. (2022). Lean six sigma in the healthcare sector: A systematic literature review. Materials Today: Proceedings, 50(5), 773–781. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2021.05.534
- Svensson, C., Antony, J., Ba-Essa, M., Bakhsh, M., & Albliwi, S. (2015). A Lean Six Sigma program in higher education. International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management, 32(9), 951–969. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJQRM-09-2014-0141
About the author
José María Berganza García lectures at CMI Higher Education in business management, process improvement and people management. He also teaches at university level and in executive education, combining academic experience with a long professional career as a business consultant and trainer. He is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and holds training and certifications in project management, Agile and Scrum, quality and continuous improvement. His main areas of work and research include Lean Six Sigma and operational excellence, People Analytics, artificial intelligence applied to people management, organisational transformation, project management and data-driven decision-making, with a particular interest in the connection between technology, processes and human behaviour. View his profile.
👉 Discover the Specialist in Quality Management and Corporate Social Responsibility
