Abstract
Six Sigma is a quality improvement approach. Lean production is a thinking mode that can be used to banish waste and accelerate process cycle time. Lean Six Sigma (LSS) combining Lean with Six Sigma is a logical and systematical management system which can help an enterprise to achieve high quality, high process efficiency and banish waste. In Taiwan, most enterprises are considered as small and medium enterprises, and thus their resources are restricted. For these reasons, it is difficult for the Taiwanese enterprises to improve their process by employing a huge and complex Six Sigma project, like GE or Motorola. What they need is an easy and convenient tool for the process improvement. This study suggests that process cycle efficiency (PCE) and process cycle efficiency destruction (PCED) can be used in LSS to quickly evaluate the performance of process. This study attempts to develop a LSS process improvement procedure. The value stream map, PCED, value-added analysis and the tools of LSS will be employed in the procedure. A case study of the process improvement in the N university’s library is demonstrated to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed procedure. The results show that the PCE of the process increases from 0.907% to 1.48%; this confirms the practicability and contribution of this study.