Lean Six Sigma as a methodology starts with an effort to understand customer requirements and finishes with the fulfillment of these requirements. It sounds simple but it can be easy to lose sight of this when talking about the details of methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma. First, we need to understand who the customer at the end of the process is: A customer is a recipient of the output of a process. A customer may be an external agency outside the organization or an internal agency within the organization.

It is crucial to gather information about customer requirements through various mechanisms such as feedback surveys, complaint data, directly speaking to the customer, and market research data. Often, these requirements are vague and non-specific, but it is nevertheless important to engage with these requirements. However, to ensure that you act effectively on the feedback, it is also important to translate these requirements into something measurable...