What will work better for our organization - Lean or Six Sigma?Often I come across senior managements who are not able to decide whether they should follow the “Lean Management” route or the “Six Sigma” route to achieve the organization’s business excellence objectives. Although these are two different methodologies but both can be used effectively.Lean Management was initially developed by Toyota in Japan, but today it is used worldwide as much in service businesses as in manufacturing businesses. Lean Management focuses on analyzing the workflow to reduce cycle times and eliminate 08 types of wastes that are often hidden in the organization’s processes.The focus of Lean is to maximize Value to the customer in terms of Q (Quality),  C (Cost) and D (Delivery). And when we talk of Quality it includes both “Quality of the Product” and “Quality of the Support”.Any activity / process-step that does not add value for the customer can be considered as Waste. Lets consider the example where a company supplies 100 laptops to their client. Due to frequent failures, the company’s engineers have to visit the site for repairs many times. These frequent visits may add cost for the laptop-supplier, but these are a total waste from the buyer’s point of view and do not add any value for the buyer.The focus in Six Sigma, is to reduce defects and variation in processes and deliver more consistent quality of products and services to buyers. Six Sigma uses a well-known and structured approach known as DMAIC to identify causes of variation and root-causes for defects and eliminate these permanently from the organization’s processes. Collecting data and analyzing the data to understand the process behaviour helps us find permanent solutions for improving the process.In my experience as an international Process-Excellence trainer and consultant, organizations can get excellent benefits by using a combination of the lean management tools and six sigma methodologies. This helps the organization to achieve their strategic objectives in a planned manner and much faster instead using only “Lean” or only “Six Sigma” one at a time.