McMaster Manufacturing Research Institute

Starting a business is hard. But growth brings a whole new set of problems, and creating systems that will help you scale can be just as hard.

As of 2022, there were 1.19 million small businesses in Canada, compared to just 23,395 medium sized businesses and 3,128 large businesses. That means less than 3% of businesses had grown past the small stage.

Having great systems in place is key to getting work done faster, reducing the amount of work that needs to be done, eliminating problems, and cutting costs. It means your business runs smoothly, efficiently, and leaves you time to focus on the stuff that will grow your business, rather than micro-managing the small stuff.

Lean Six Sigma is a proven methodology that allows you to take a step back and evaluate your business, identify weaknesses in those systems, and develop a plan for improvement. It’s been used for years by companies such as Motorola, General Electric, and McKesson to increase customer satisfaction, increase efficiency, and reduce costs.

This course will rapidly teach you the basics you need to start implementing Lean Six Sigma principles in your business. In under three hours, you’ll Learn:

• The DMAIC framework at the heart of every Lean Six Sigma process improvement project.
• How to identify inefficiencies in your business that could be costing you money.
• Tools to narrow down problems and find the root cause so it can be eliminated, permanently.
• How to decide what to fix first, to have maximum impact for the lowest effort.

Your course instructor

This course is taught by Shagha Rouzmeh, an expert with years of experience planning and implementing Lean Six Sigma in industry.

She’s currently a senior Engineering Program Manager at Medtronic, one of the largest medical device companies in the world.

She manages large scale projects between 1 to 5 years in scope, which are mostly design change projects.

Her career began over 10 years ago in the aerospace sector, where she got her start at Pratt & Whitney before moving on to other aerospace companies like Zodiac and Safran.

She achieved her lean six sigma black belt a few years after beginning her career, and has been consulting, providing workshops, and supporting lean six sigma efforts across industry since then.

Here’s exactly what you’ll cover in this course:

Module 1: Introduction and Overview

• What Lean and Six Sigma are, and how they work together
• What value is, how it’s defined, and how to identify activities that add value and those that should be eliminated
• Toyota’s 3M system for identifying weaknesses in your business
• The 8 key areas waste occurs in businesses
• The DMAIC methodology that’s at the heart of every lean six sigma improvement project

Module 2: Define Phase

• What is VOC data, how you get it, and how to identify which factors matter to your customer base
• A critical tool for mapping your processes so you can get a high-level overview and understand where to start with a problem
• The 5W and 2H tool to clarify a problem and find the exact area you need to focus on to avoid wasting resources
• How to map a process and identify areas where waste exists

Module 3: Measure Phase

• Considerations you need to make before collecting data
• How much data do you really need to collect?
• Deciding where to look for data

Module 4: Analyze Phase

• How to brainstorm, and why you can’t skip it
• How to analyze your process
• The Fish Bone method of identifying cause and effect
• How to prevent repeat problems by identifying the Root Cause

Module 5: Improve Phase

• The first thing you need to do when planning improvements
• How to rank next steps to decide what to do first

Module 6: Control Phase

• What is a control plan?
• Key considerations when making your control plan