Getting Lean

Accenture acquired the George Group, which specializes in Lean Six Sigma, about a year ago. Lean Six Sigma combines process improvement methodology with efficient process discipline to reduce delivery times and costs and increase customer satisfaction.

Together, the companies have been making a push in retail, helping businesses streamline their processes and improve efficiency. STORES recently spoke with Tony Curtis, partner, process and innovation performance for Accenture, about Lean Six Sigma in retail.

How did Lean Six Sigma come about?
The lean portion came from the Toyota production system on the shop floor in Japan. Motorola was given the credit for founding Six Sigma, which is really a reduction of a variation in processes. GE in the late ’80s, early ’90s made Six Sigma popular in the transactional services world with Jack Welch’s mandate for everyone to get that learning and training. Lean Six Sigma is really about two things: reducing waste -- removing anything that’s not value-added to the customer -- and …making processes very consistent and repeatable.

How can Lean Six Sigma be valuable for retailers?
It can help reduce all the non-value-added activities and focus on the customer, and provide consumers [with] a consistent experience -- whether that be in stores, on the web, catalog sales, etc. Lean Six Sigma fits very naturally to the retail world.

What are some of the challenges in applying this methodology to retail?
Retail historically has been driven by relationships and individuals using their gut instincts to make decisions. Lots of times those decisions are great; sometimes they’re off the mark. What Lean Six Sigma has been able to do is bring some validity to those decision-making processes around data and direct feedback from customers. Applying some of the tools and methodology can sometimes be intimidating, just from the statistical analysis and some of the funny names such as black belts, master black belts and green belts.

One of your retailer clients is Staples. How have you helped that company in particular?
When Staples approached us about expanding their continuous improvement program, they had done some lean events, where people come into a room together to lean out the processes and make them more efficient. They had some great success with that over the years and they wanted to expand upon it and actually build an infrastructure and a true Lean Six Sigma deployment.

Staples chose to do a traditional black belt/green belt approach. Black belts are full-time in their roles and do nothing but work on process-improvement projects that are sponsored by the business. Green belts keep their normal full-time positions and use [Six Sigma] schools of methodology to work on projects within their areas.

What are some specific examples of Staples’ projects?
Staples has consolidated freight as they move from a DC to store or DC to another staging location, streamlining the order item-cycle time. Also, Lean Six Sigma has helped in lease negotiations. From the time that it’s an inkling in their eye that they want to put a store on First and Main, we answer: “How do we go about identifying that property? What is zoning with the local government? Construction plans?” And we actually select the balloons for the grand opening. Those are some examples of what we’ve done with Staples, and, quite honestly, those types of projects we’ve done with other retailers, as well.

Why is Lean Six Sigma important enough to warrant consideration in the current retail landscape?
Given the state of the economy, where there’s just not a lot of fluff, every retailer needs to be as lean and mean as possible. There are a lot of options for the customer in the marketplace today. The Internet has changed our world.

Take Staples, for example. If you want to buy a pad of paper, think about all the different places that you can go to do that. That being said, you’re going to need processes. You’re going to need product flow that’s most easily accessible for customers and they can get the most out of that in the most efficient manner. That plays right into Lean Six Sigma and its schools of methodology.

To be competitive, Lean Six Sigma is almost a necessity. While most retailers may not come out and say, “Hey I’m doing a structured Lean Six Sigma program,” there are probably pockets within the organization that are doing some type of process-improvement effort: they have to just to stay competitive. As we did with Staples and as we do with all our clients, we’ll come in and create a customized program.

How deep into an organization does the training go?
We start out by engaging senior leaders. After the CEO and COO levels and upper and middle management, we may choose to hold a one-day awareness session; participants can go through a simulation to get some hands-on experience. That’s something that we’ve found to be very, very beneficial to retailers.

I have one retail client that’s basically taking about 60 to 70 percent of their corporate headquarters -- about 3,000 to 3,500 people -- through a one-day training session just to make them aware of Lean Six Sigma. That’s great, just for the fact that they get some general understanding. And what makes it resonate in retail so well is the projects that are accomplished are done by the team members.