Six Sigma

Six Sigma Small Business

Considering the fact that small companies contribute to about 70-75% of the value stream activity, it is extremely imperative to bring such companies under the Six Sigma umbrella. The challenges faced by such companies may be smaller in proportions as they are smaller in size, but in the end challenges are faced by them too. Six Sigma Small Business as a strategy is extremely important in the context where these challenges hinder customer satisfaction levels and company productivity.

Do we adopt the same Six Sigma approach as in the case of big companies?

Directly answered "No". The only reason being that performance enhancers and performance inhibitors vary in a big manner across organizations of different sizes. If a process performance impacts customer satisfaction for a small company, it will for a big company too. The difference is when you do the analysis of the data which has been collected. You cannot deploy the same analysis strategy across different sizes, especially if the process metric is impacted by the size of the organization. With the "One Size Fits All" therapy conveniently discarded due to non-applicability in case of small companies, do we have an option?

Scalable Deployment Model for Six Sigma Small Business

Typically defined and designed for practicing Six Sigma in small and medium sized businesses is the Scalable deployment model for Six Sigma. A scalable deployment model is suited best for small businesses and below are the stages:

• Developing the Six Sigma Strategy and implementation Approach
  
  
• Implementation planning
  
  
• Team formation for the execution of the project
  
  
• Education plan - Starting from Yellow Belt, each professional in the organization must learn the concepts of the level, implement it in form of a project and then be transitioned to the next level (Green Belt, Black Belt etc).
  
  
• Role Transition - Starting from day 1 when the first resource does a Six Sigma certification, the knowledge and the expertise needs to be shared and passed on. This would ensure that new resources would get a chance to understand Six Sigma concepts and get certified. More employees getting certified in a small company would directly translate to cost savings by means of achievement of project objectives. This would indirectly contribute for savings of the company when it comes to training employees for higher level of certifications.

All this would mean that there is a very close relation between knowledge and business objectives. In essence, it is not too different from the basic concept of Six Sigma. The only difference is in the way how it is deployed. And especially for small companies, this is the way to go.