Discussant comments on the paper 'Innovating to do more with less - the story of Lean Six Sigma in the Central Statistics Office, Ireland' [1]

摘要

The roots of both Lean and Six Sigma reach back to when the greatest pressure for quality and speed were on manufacturing. Together the two methodologies enable a reduction of the cost of complexity. Today Lean Six Sigma is used successfully to manage the quality of business processes in many domains across the private and public sectors. The objective of Lean methodology is to speed up production while not compromising quality. Lean is described through a set of principles, which include focussing on value-added work rather than non-value-added work, elimination of various types of waste, and keeping close contact with users and clients. The objectives pertaining to quality in a National Statistics Office (NSO) are also described through a set of principles, often referred to as a Quality Assurance Framework [2] or Code of Practice [3]. At Statistics Canada we express our quality principles in our Quality Assurance Framework (QAF). The Lean principles resonate well with the QAF principles of assuring cost-effectiveness, assuring sound implementation, and managing relationships with data users.