Parts Is Parts?
©2020, George J. Irwin. All rights reserved.

The phrase “parts is parts” was used in an advertising campaign which slammed an offering of a certain fast food chain’s product for its allegedly suspect content. Lately, I’ve been reminded of the commercial which featured “parts is parts” as a tag line when looking at an apparent divide between the practice of Lean Six Sigma for manufacturing versus service processes.

The argument could be made that the making of widgets is quite different than the delivery of services. There’s truth to that: products are tangible, measurable in a physical sense, and can require very close tolerances. You probably don’t want nuclear reactor, or aircraft, or military parts to be out of specification by even a fraction of a fraction. This is a place where even Six Sigma isn’t good enough. It’s also relatively simpler to see a defect in a product than a service. And it’s also easier to measure whether a product is correct or not, for example, whether a box of Zappies Cereal has the Net Weight of Eight Ounces or not, or a steel ball bearing is an exact sphere.

On the other hand, a service performed sometimes but not always depends on a softer metric, like Is The Customer Satisfied. Services like open heart surgery are not necessarily in this category! And we certainly hope that surgical procedures are better than Six Sigma as well. Determining whether a call taken by a Customer Service Representative is “defective” is likely measured by whether the caller is happy with the outcome. What if the representative did everything right but the caller still isn’t happy?

The net of it is that Lean Six Sigma practitioners are sought out and classified based on their experience in product or service, sometimes a very specific product or service (a recent example: the somewhat oxymoronic “food manufacturing”). Although I’ll freely admit that I have much more knowledge of how the process works for, say approving a request for aspirin, versus how that aspirin is actually made, I think we’re missing an opportunity here.

In my view, it’s simply this: “process is process,” to twist the title phrase of this post. A good Lean Six Sigma Practitioner had better be able to understand how to develop and verify the how, when, who, and why regardless of whether it’s an object made or a service delivered. Sure, specific knowledge is helpful, but I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker because a capable Black Belt needs to be able to learn quickly and accurately, to ask questions for understanding and clarity, and to ascertain and evaluate where and why the process isn’t working optimally. Saying that a Black Belt in manufacturing can’t cross over to handle a process improvement in the service industry is like saying you can’t drive a Chevy because you’ve always owned a Ford. The details may differ but the overall concepts are the same. (Well, I’ll leave out manual versus automatic transmission.) Practitioners can’t, and managers shouldn’t, stick Black Belts into boxes. In fact, I’ve found that the more broad my own experience became, the better I got at picking up processes outside my comfort zone. I don’t think I’m a special case here.