SUMMARY
The Six Sigma Roadmap involves five steps:
STEP ONE: Identify Core Processes and Key Customers
This step is very crucial especially in the modern age, when businesses become more diverse and customers get more specific. You need to see the “big picture” by knowing your organizational processes — or your business as a whole — and connect it with the customers you are targeting to reach. Ask yourself the following questions:
a. What are our core or value-adding processes?
b. What products and/or services do we provide to our customers?
c. How do processes “flow” across the organizations?
STEP TWO: Define Customer Requirements
It is odd, but true, that most companies do not really know their customers. They think they do but they really don’t. This step will help you establish standards for performance that are based on actual customer feedback, and develop or enhance systems to gather invaluable “Voice of Customer” data. If you achieve this, you will be more effective and capable of accurately measuring customer needs, and therefore work successfully toward satisfying them.
STEP THREE: Measure Current Performance
While Step Two tells you what the customer wants, this step will evaluate how well you have been delivering your services to the customer and how likely you are going to do it in the future. You can do this in three ways:
a. Develop baseline measures—quantifiable evaluations of current/recent process performance.
b. Establish capability measures—assessment of the ability of the current process/output to deliver on requirements. They include sigma scores for each process.
c. Employ measurement systems—new or enhanced methods and resources for ongoing measurement against customer-focused performance standards.
STEP FOUR: Prioritize, Analyze, and Implement Improvements
At this stage, you now have the facts and measures to evaluate your organization. It is now time to deploy a Six Sigma improvement. You can now start identifying high-potential improvement opportunities and develop process-oriented solutions. To do this, you need to consider the following:
a. Improvement priorities—assessing and selecting Six Sigma projects based on their impact and feasibility.
b. Process improvements—identifying solutions targeted at specific root causes.
c. New or redesigned processes—workflows designed for new demands, new technologies, which are sometimes called Six Sigma Design or Business Process Redesign.
STEP FIVE: Expand and Integrate the Six Sigma System
You are now ready to take on the task of building a long-term vision of a Six Sigma Organization. You now begin to drive improved performance and establish a system for constant measurement, reexamination, and renewal of products, services, processes, and procedures.
Your organizational checklist will include:
a. Process controls
b. A process ownership and management
c. A response plan
d. A Six Sigma “Culture”
This Roadmap is not the only way to achieve Six Sigma effectiveness in your organization. Depending on your organization’s needs or readiness, you may adjust the order of these steps, or start on more than one of them simultaneously. It is recommended, however, that you perform them in this order, as these activities build up the essential foundation that will support and sustain your Six Sigma improvement.
Nevertheless, the Roadmap itself will give you the following advantages:
COMMENTARY
Many management systems fail because they cannot implement it properly. Along the way, they could not sustain the improvements. The reason for this is that they have a weak foundation for supporting their initiatives.
The Six Sigma Roadmap precisely serves as that foundation essential to continuous success. Its five-step methodology defines the core competencies of Six Sigma starting from the very basic step of identifying the customers and their needs to the integration of the whole system. Thus, there is always a clear understanding of all the processes. Decisions therefore are better made.
The Roadmap also illustrates that a single step is as critical as the others. This only means that there should never be a let-up in its implementation. A lapse in a single step could lead to total failure.
