This article confirms what a growing body of research is beginning to show: Lean Six Sigma is no longer confined to factory production lines. When applied to procurement and supply chain management, it can reduce cycle times, cut order delays, and even enhance resilience by stripping out hidden variability. In practice, Lean Six Sigma shifts procurement away from one-off savings claims and pushes it towards a consistent, value-creating process.
How do we know this? Can we prove it? Could Lean Six Sigma be a game changer? Let’s start with negotiations, how we view them, and how Lean Six Sigma is making an impact for change.
Negotiations often feel like an art: unpredictable, personality-driven, and inconsistent. But did you ever think that the variability of Lean Six Sigma can turn your “art” of procurement into a science to give procurement leaders a strategy for reducing unnecessary noise and reclaiming lost value? (Noise here means variability (inconsistency) and bias that can erode the quality and fairness of purchasing decisions.)
Lean Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology that merges the Lean principle of eliminating waste with the Six Sigma principle of reducing process variation to improve efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction in businesses.1
For decades, Lean Six Sigma has been viewed through the lens of factory operations within the manufacturing industry. But, as time passed, Lean Six Sigma became a language of Defects Per Million Opportunities (DPMO), control charts, and variations on production lines. (DPMO is a metric that quantifies performance of a process by measuring the number of defects per million opportunities for a defect to occur.)2
But research has shown that the supply chains that feed and extend beyond those factory operations too often produce misleading contradictions – each carrying a cost. Such contradictions are not as simple as defective parts rolling off an assembly line. Instead, they might show up as inconsistent supplier performances, misaligned incentives, or negotiations – all of which can deliver radically different results than expected – depending on who is at the table overseeing the processes.
Believe it or not, I learned this lesson when I undertook my Green Belt certification project.3 At the time I wanted to test whether the Six Sigma discipline could address procurement’s hidden variability – a variability defined, in part, as “the unseen and often unmeasured factors in the purchasing process that can significantly impact a company's total cost, supply chain stability, and overall business performance. These are costs and inefficiencies that are not reflected in the initial purchase price, but instead accumulate over time, leading to budget overruns and operational disruptions.”4
The result of my test produced a mindset for me that linked supplier performance ratings directly to commercial outcomes. What began as an experiment soon became a replicable logic that reduced negotiation variance, delivered measurable savings, and strengthened supplier trust across multiple regions.
I discovered that the Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (DMAIC) cycle provided a structure to make sense of what, for many teams, felt like an intangible art.
DMAIC is defined as “a structured problem-solving methodology used in Six Sigma to optimize and stabilize existing business processes. The cycle begins with identifying the problem and goals, collecting data to understand the current state, analyzing that data to find root causes, implementing targeted solutions to improve the process, and finally controlling the improved process to sustain the gains.“5
The team I was working with began our research into this by first defining the problem. We discovered that:
- Supplier scorecards lived in one system, while pricing and terms were negotiated in another.
- High-performing suppliers were not consistently rewarded, and underperformers often still secured competitive terms.
- The defect, in Six Sigma language, was the delta between supplier performance and the economics they achieved.
Therefore, measuring meant building a clean dataset that paired financial outcomes with supplier ratings. Instead of drowning in hundreds of loosely related Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), we focused on the few KPIs that directly influenced value: quality, delivery, responsiveness, and innovation. This disciplined approach revealed a pattern of variability that had been hiding in plain sight.
Procurement needed guardrails!
The analysis showed that the spread in negotiation results was not random. Certain categories, geographies, and even individual negotiation styles produced outliers (data points deviating widely from the overall data pattern) far beyond what a stable process should deliver. In the same way -- because control charts expose variation on a production line -- our analysis revealed the need for guardrails in procurement.
Suppliers needed to improve their KPIs
Improvement came in the form of a performance-monetization logic. Suppliers were grouped into performance tiers, each tied to a clear and narrow commercial corridor. Movement between tiers was transparent and predictable, so suppliers could see exactly how improving their KPIs would translate into better terms.
Suppliers and buyers started winning
This transformed negotiations from positional battles into structured dialogues about data. The result was both economic and relational: we realized savings as well as trust! Suppliers began to view the system as fair, and buyers no longer relied on individual heroics to secure good deals.
Buyers and suppliers took control and enjoyed new clarity!
The final step, control, ensured the approach would outlive the project. Governance routines were put in place, dashboards tracked variance, and sourcing playbooks were updated so the method could be replicated across markets. Within months, we saw negotiation outcomes cluster more tightly around the defined corridors, with outliers shrinking as both buyers and suppliers adjusted to the new clarity.
We turned variability into trust, consistency and long-term resilience!
Looking back, what struck me most was how naturally the Six Sigma mindset translated to the negotiation table. Just as a production engineer sees variation as waste, a procurement leader can view inconsistent commercial outcomes as a defect in need of correction. With the right measures and discipline, those defects can be reduced, and value once lost to variability can be reclaimed.
If you are a leader navigating today’s uncertain supply chains, this shift in perspective is powerful. As mentioned in the introduction above, Lean Six Sigma offers more than tools. It offers a mindset that transforms procurement from cost-cutting to value creation. Beyond the factory floor, it gives us a way to turn variability into trust, consistency, and long-term resilience.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Artem Koverznev published an article in the CEJ on August 13, 2025 titled From interrogation room to negotiation table – How emotional intelligence is reshaping the future of procurement. He is a global procurement leader with over 17 years of experience in international sourcing, strategic negotiations, and supplier development. He currently serves as Global Category Manager at BSH Home Appliances GmbH, where he manages a €60M ($69,465,000.00 U.S. dollars) portfolio and leads global projects across Europe, the U.S., and Turkey. He is certified in Lean Six Sigma (Green Belt) and was recognized by Supply & Demand Chain Executive as one of the 2025 Pros to Know. Based in Munich, Artem integrates analytics, human-centered strategy, and cross-cultural collaboration to transform procurement into a value-creating business function.
ABOUT BSH HOME APPLIANCES GmbH
BSH Home Appliances GmbH is a leading global manufacturer of home appliances under the brands Bosch, Siemens, NEFF, Gaggenau, Thermador and many others and a proud member of the Bosch Group. Headquartered in Munich, Germany, BSH operates in more than 50 countries with a strong portfolio of renowned brands. Its international mission is to improve quality of life through innovative technologies, sustainable solutions, and customer-centric design. With a global supply chain and a commitment to digital transformation, BSH actively shapes the future of smart, efficient, and responsible living.
END NOTES
- Lean Six Sigma definition - AI Overview
- DPMO defined - AI Overview
- Green belt certification definition, AI Overview
- Procurement’s hidden variability definition, AI Overview
- What is AI Overview?