Wednesday, October 28, 2009

LSS Deployment Benchmarks - How do you stack up?

Karen Welch from Abbott Nutrition presented in October at the 4th Annual Global Lean, Six Sigma and Business Improvement Summit. She quoted a few interesting (or depressing, depending on how you see it) statistics from Leap Technologies. I thought I'd share the ones that really caught my eye.

  • Close to 50% of organizations making a significant investment in LSS complete fewer than 10 projects in the first two years despite significant training investment.
  • Less than 15% Green Belts trained in LS methods (80 hrs classroom time) actually complete a project.
  • Close to 40% BB training is devoted to teaching DOE, yet the majority report never using the tool in an actual project.
  • Despite a goal of changing the culture, employee participation in LS projects average less than 10% of the workforce

How does this compare to your organization? We’ve spent a great deal of time on these very issues, and I’d like to think we’ve made progress in our organization, but I’m curious as to the state of the practice in other companies.
So how many of these four items would you dispute on your team?