The Scientific Underpinning of Lean Six Sigma

The twentieth century saw an incredible development of professional organizations. The impact of technological advances is obvious, but besides these, innovations in management structures and methods have resulted in the highly productive organizations of today. Lean Six Sigma is not revolutionary. It is built on principles and methods that have proven themselves over the twentieth century. It has incorporated the most effective approaches and integrated them into a full program. It offers a management structure for organizing continuous improvement of routine tasks, such as manufacturing, service delivery, accounting, nursing, sales, and other work that is done routinely. Further, it offers a method and tools for carrying out improvement projects effectively. In an economy which is determined more and more by dynamics than by static advantages, continuous improvement of routine tasks is a crucial driver of competitiveness.
In this paper it is shown that Lean Six Sigma's method has a sound basis in science, thus aiming to provide a case for Lean Six Sigma based on its core principles, rather than rhetoric.