Cutting Waste Where Nobody Looks: A Six Sigma Lens on Planning
Cutting Waste Where Nobody Looks: A Six Sigma Lens on Planning
Most teams hunt for waste in the obvious places, inventory sitting too long, capacity left idle, freight paid in a hurry. Those matter. But after a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt program and years across consulting and supply chain, I've learned the expensive waste usually hides somewhere quieter: in the planning process itself.
Variation is the waste you can't see
The most costly thing in a planning process is rarely a single bad number. It's variation, the same decision made differently every cycle, depending on who's in the room and what mood the spreadsheet is in.
Six Sigma trained me to treat that variation as the enemy. Not the override, not the exception, but the *unexplained* override and the *undocumented* exception. When a process produces a different answer each time from the same inputs, you don't have a process. You have a habit with good intentions.
Document until it's boring
Early in my career, business analysis taught me to write things down until they're unambiguous. It's unglamorous work, and it's where most of the leverage lives.
A planning step that lives only in one person's head is a single point of failure wearing a friendly face. The moment you write it down, the assumption, the trigger, the threshold, you can question it, improve it, and hand it off. Boring documentation is what lets a small team move fast without tripping over itself.
Measure the second action, not just the first
It's easy to make a planning cycle *look* successful. The plan was published, the meeting happened, everyone nodded. The real test is what happens next: did anyone change a decision because of it? Did the forecast actually get more accurate? Did the stockout not happen?
I try to measure the second action, not the first, because the first is easy to stage and the second is where value actually shows up. A plan nobody acts on is just an expensive opinion.
Why "do it right" is a strategy, not a slogan
It would be faster, in the moment, to skip the measurement and ship the plan. But the shortcut always comes back, re-litigated in three meetings, rebuilt twice, trusted by no one.
So I treat rigor as a property of how the work gets done, not a phase before the deadline. Cut the waste, expose the variation, make it repeatable. Do it right, and the next cycle is easier than the last, which is the only real proof that a process is working.
Manisha skipped presentations and built real AI products.
Manisha Satapathy was part of the April 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 18 other talented participants.