I had a client recently who had a request that I work in what I considered to be an interesting improvement opportunity - “Improvements in “daycare” or “childcare””. Working with Six Sigma and Lean you have opportunities to work in a number of different fields and industries, for me primarily, logistics, manufacturing, and healthcare. The offer to work with childcare was a new one for me but it just shows how universal and complementary improvement work can be for any business. I was excited to see that the business owner had the understanding of and valued lean for the engagement in their processes.

I found that day care businesses are expected to have some of the fastest employment growth through 2020 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the number of privately held day care firms had risen 9% in 2014 with one of the highest growth margins averaging 96%. Lean and six sigma can be used similarly in any industry to improve productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness.
For this particular project scope the request was to look at increasing enrollment, improving safety, and improving their brand through the quality of customer experience.

Using DMAIC there are a number of tangible, measureable ways to develop low and no cost methods to improve business marketing, improve safety processes using Andons and 5S, and then improve the quality perception of the daycare facility by delivering quality services above and beyond just basic childcare by using the “Voice of the Customer”.

Using six sigma in marketing you are able to focus on customer value, communicate your quality, and design change into your processes which enables growth.

Using lean, safety goals are aligned with business objectives to create a link between resource needs and allocation. This is done by defining, recognizing, training and measuring in a metric driven improvement where the systems is flexible to accommodate the culture.

Improving your brand occurs through defining the voice of the customer. This includes what the customers’ requirements are for products and services and what their expectations are both positive and negative including likes, dislikes, problems and suggestions.  It helps determine core business processes involved in their needs and helps the businesses develop the critical to quality elements (CTQs) and develop process metrics (KPOVs). The VOC asks what each customer desires specifically - what is important to them and what do they perceive is a defect in a quality or service.