Process Mapping – Lean or Six Sigma Tool?

If someone walked up to your this morning at the coffee machine and asked you, “Is process mapping a Lean or Six Sigma tool?” what would you say? This may seem like a trivial question but I dare say it is not.

Poka-Yoke is a Six Sigma Tool?

I remember reading Michael Georges’ book “Lean Six Sigma” and being taken aback a bit when he said Poka-Yoke was a Six Sigma tool. I thought, “Huh, are you crazy man?” Then I stopped for a second and realized I had first learned about Poka-Yoke in a Six Sigma training class many moons ago. So is Michael George wrong?

This gets right to the point of this article which is what tool bag do certain tools belong to? Let us begin with Process Mapping.

Types of Process Maps

Most of us have drawn up process maps. My favorites are the ones drawn up over lunch on a napkin. There are many different kinds of process maps such as:

• SIPOC
• Business Process Maps
• Detailed Process Maps
• Swim Lane
• Brown Paper
• Value Stream Maps

Each of these process maps helps us in different ways and at varying degrees of detail but they all have one thing in common – they help us better understand how something works.

Both Lean and Six Sigma rely upon this basic understanding in order to get on with more advanced things like deciding if a step is muda (Lean approach) or determining which inputs are controllable, noise, or SOP (Six Sigma approach).

Value Stream Maps

What about Value Stream Maps, also referred to as ‘Material and Information Flow Maps’ by Toyota? Surely this is a Lean tool, right? I mean Toyota invented it! Well, out of respect for Toyota and the sensei that first drew them, I would say that VSMs officially belong in the Lean tool kit. But it doesn’t mean a Six Sigma practitioner cannot use them!

Process Maps Unite!

For example, a favorite trick of mine is to start with a SIPOC to get a better understanding of the process and who should be on my team (I use the supplier and customer columns and pick team members accordingly). I then usually move to a VSM where I “learn to see” the process. Next, depending on the situation I may decide to drill into a process step with a swim lane process map in order to really understand this process step.

Learn More about Process Mapping

This article was originally written in 2007.  We have since added a lot of mapping-related resources to Gemba Academy.  Doing a simple search of our website using the search box is probably the best way to find this content.  But, some of my personal favorites are covered in our Transforming your Value Streams and Business Process Mapping series of videos.

Summary

So, to answer my own question of whether a process map is a Lean or Six Sigma tool I will respond with the obvious answer – yes!

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