production and increase manufacturing speed and product quality. The six sigma was process was developed by Motorola in 1986 and later coupled with ‘lean management’ techniques to provide a diverse range of industries with a more sustainable set of skills to manage a variety of production and manufacturing processes.
Accreditation is offered by private and university suppliers of lean six sigma training and is available internationally on-site or online. Free tutorials and introductory resources abound, and many textbooks and high quality training materials are available for purchase.
Skills acquired through lean six sigma training can be used to enhance projects in emerging technology fields where the application of new technologies is not thoroughly tested. Projects that make use of remote sensor technology, for example, to monitor climate and environmental conditions could benefit from the use of lean six sigma processes and streamline the integration of new remote sensor technologies into global and local decision-making structures.
Remote sensor technologies are an innovative set of, often low-cost, products that allow for the collection, storage and analysis of real-time data that has previously been unavailable to decision-makers. Emerging companies like Libelium, for example, offer a suite of remote sensor products that can automate data collection to measure agricultural production, map climate impacts, monitor contamination risks or measure water and energy consumption. For example, Libelium’s agricultural sensor board allows farmers and food production managers to ensure that stock is adequately watered during the production phase and protected from adverse weather events.
Despite the low cost of these technologies, it can be overwhelming and wasteful to use them in a blanket fashion across an agricultural business but as an emerging technology there are limited models of how to the technology has been used effectively to date. Like any technology that provides data, there is the risk of over-collecting information that can drown us in meaningless statistics and project managers seeking to make use of the resource benefits of remote sensor technologies could undertake lean six sigma training to ensure that the benefits of remote sensor technologies are maximised while being incorporated into organisational processes.
If businesses, civic authorities and national governments are to make use of emerging technologies quickly and efficiently, there needs to be a limit on the resource costs of implementation and the risks associated with a steep learning curve. We have seen with other clean technologies, such as solar power, the prohibitive nature of their more widespread introduction years ago which would drastically have altered our current mix of energy reliance if there were less cost barriers to their introduction in initial years. As adverse weather conditions become a regular feature of our climatic and environmental patterns, we must incorporate new technologies that provide advance warning systems and that protect production assets and processes.
Lean six sigma training can provide a methodical stepwise process to production managers when deciding where and when to implement new and emerging technologies and how to best use the data that is generated to guide decision-making processes.