ABSTRACT
What do customer-focused quality and Six Sigma have to do with lean production? In a word: everything. Every product that has a physical flaw or fails to meet customer needs is defective, and a defective product is waste. A lean producer must have a rigorous quality assurance methodology to ensure that customer needs are incorporated into the product design, and that the manufacturing process faithfully conforms to that design in every unit produced. That methodology must require rigorous usage of data collection, problem solving, and statistical analysis tools by everyone, including managers, staff, and operators and assemblers. It must include emphasis on building the “capability” of a process so the output conforms to design requirements, and on practices that virtually eliminate the sources of production defects. The methods of Six Sigma in combination with those of lean production help round out the lean producer’s improvement toolkit. The following sections describe concepts and methods associated with customer-focused quality, starting with the popular quality methodology that Avi decided to adopt.
