Lean and Six Sigma Foundations For Beginners In 2026

There are nineteen steps between a supplier invoice arriving and that supplier being paid.

Four of them add value. The other fifteen are handling, checking, chasing, re keying and waiting. Nobody designed it that way. It accumulated, one reasonable decision at a time, over years.

The rework and the late payment penalties come to three hundred and forty thousand dollars a year, and there is no budget line for any of it. That is what makes it invisible. It is not an overspend. It is spread across a hundred small ordinary activities that all look like work.

The money is already being spent. This course teaches you to see it.

A note on scope before you buy. This is awareness level foundations. It is not a belt certification and it does not qualify you for one. It is aligned to the fundamentals in the closest published body of knowledge, and where the certification bodies disagree with each other, this course says so. You will hear that in the first minute of the first lesson too.

What it covers. Twenty six short lessons. Where these methods came from and what each was built to answer. What the cost of poor quality actually is. When to use this and when to use something else.

Then the lean half. Value and the value stream. The wastes, and the honest account of whether there are seven or eight of them. Flow, pull and kanban. Five S and standard work. Kaizen and the improvement cycle.

Then the six sigma half. Outputs as a function of inputs. The roles. Defects, units and defects per million opportunities. Yield, and the hidden factory it reveals. Sigma levels and capability.

Then the method end to end, with its tollgates, the charter that stops scope creep, the seven basic quality tools, and root cause work that stops at something you actually control.

Then data and variation, which is the section most worth watching slowly. Common cause and special cause. Why adjusting a stable process makes it worse, demonstrated rather than asserted. Measurement system analysis. And four ways data misleads honest people.

Then improve, control, choosing a first project, and an accurate account of the belt path.