After great success with Green Belt projects, the first Black belt program was launched in August of 2024 with leadership at various refractory manufacturing facilities across India. The corporate improvement team requested Lean Six Sigma Black Belt training to be conducted virtually, but spread out over 3 months (4 hours per session, 16 total sessions, about 2 sessions per week).
On average, each project has estimated or validated on average about $68,000 per project per person, with a median savings of $49,000 per project per project (more typical outcome). This resulted in a total savings of over $800,000!
The investment cost into the training was between $2000-3000 per person for a class of 13 people. Each student’s time commitment is 64 hours of training, coaching sessions with us (about 5-10 hours per person), plus the time to work on the project with their team (approximately 4 hours per week for about 6 months after training is completed, or about 80 hours per person). That equates to a total of 160 hours of their time (or 4 full weeks). At the Black Belt level, they were also asked to teach a module and explain how they are mentoring Green Belts in their facility.
The return on investment has been less than one month (at least 10:1 return), which makes this an easy decision on whether to enroll in future programs. In addition, the skills they learned in the program will be leveraged on all future projects and activities for that employee (leading to even more benefits).
For this group, since they all had leadership positions in their facility, there were some pros and cons to having them in the Black Belt program.
By giving these advanced problem solving skills to leaders, the change in culture and long-term impact will be significant to the organization. There will be continued mentoring and coaching of their direct reports, which will drive the use of the tools into the organization.
The downside is that there were challenges with consistent class attendance for some people, and almost every project experienced 1-2 months of delays due to facility issues and problems that took attention away from the project. Although the training started in August, most projects did not start until January 2025, which added 4 months to the project completion timeline. Once projects began, they were completed in 7-12 months, but they actually took 11-16 months on the calendar. However, the leaders were committed to completing the projects, and eventually they succeeded.
Another unique challenge with this group was the time zone difference between the US and India. The difference required very early morning training sessions and very late night coaching sessions for 16 months. There was a slight impact on project support when questions would not get answered until the next business day.
But we are 100% committed to getting project results for our clients, and we will adjust our schedule to make it work for our clients!
Despite the challenges, here are the impressive results:
| Class | # Trained | # Projects Completed* | Annual Benefits* | Avg per Project |
| Aug – Oct 2024 | 13 (12 certified) | 6 (2 people per project) | $800,000 | $135,000 ($68,000 per person) (median = $98,000 or $49,000 per person) |
* Some projects did require investment in tools, software and supplies to achieve benefits, but none were capital (significant) investments
If you’d like to have us help you with a similar program conducted virtually (where we provide the Master Black Belt support of the projects if you don’t have it), please check out our Lean Six Sigma Coaching Program for Organizations >>>
If you want something specific, then fill out the quote form and we can create a custom quote for your company, and help you achieve a similar return on investment.
New to Lean Six Sigma> Get started with our FREE Lean Six Sigma White Belt course >>>