Six Sigma

The Six Sigma Way

Do you wish to know the secrets of the amazing success of companies like GE, Motorola? When these companies started off, they were just like any other company trying to establish a name for themselves in their respective domains. What made them stand out from their competitors though was the fact that they had the appetite for risk to fine tune their processes. This, they did by designing processes by the Six Sigma Way. The results to follow are there for everyone to be seen. These are the companies which lead the bandwagon of companies in Cost Reduction and Productivity Improvement.

How can a company successfully adapt their processes to the Six Sigma way?

The data centric model of the Six Sigma way enables companies to measure and analyze the improvements to their processes. The performance management tool takes a new turn with companies able to improve and control their metrics' performance in a sustained manner. The most effective end objective of any Six Sigma model is to integrate their quality objectives to the success and cost reduction in business costs. Under such circumstances, a lot of companies are taking up the Six Sigma model.

Here is a brief roadmap on how new companies are integrating the Six Sigma way of Quality Management with their processes:

• Business Managers look at metrics under-performing metrics which needed improvement to ensure customer satisfaction, arrive at the desired goal of such metrics and analyze the gap. For example, in a manufacturing company, the Six Sigma goal could be to reduce production lead times to 2 days from the already existing 10 days.
  
  
• Business Managers involve their teams in a data collecting and data collating process by which data is collected historically (ideally over a period of 60-90 days).
  
  
• Business Managers analyze the data and come up with a cause-effect analysis for dips in performance. Plans are laid out to tackle the causes which have been identified. This is the stage where various performance improvement tools are used and the business managers optimize their process the Six Sigma Way.
  
  
• One processes are optimized, it is important for Managers to measure the resultant data to see if their Six Sigma Project is a success. This they do by implementing the Six Sigma project over a phase of 45-60 days to observe the effect of the improvement mechanisms.
  
  
• In case, if the data from the resultant stage does not quite match up to the expectations, managers can make fine adjustments to their processes.

At the end of the effort, managers would get their mission-critical processes fine - tuned the Six Sigma way. All this can only be achieved with the active involvement of all the concerned team members and good process co-ordination. And examples of such companies just proves a point in the case.