Business in financial services organizations, customer support centers, hospitals are called transactional. Every day, a single transaction faces unique challenges and to overcome them, an organization must employ a breakthrough process improvement. Such improvement can only be done through Six Sigma initiatives.
A white paper by Six Sigma Qualtec discusses in detail transactional Six Sigma, which successfully manages the differences and helps clients obtain significant financial results.
According to the paper, transactional businesses involve several internal and external customers, and therefore they need to use different metrics from those used by manufacturing services. For example, in a transactional business, the process is the product. In other words, tasks are performed independently of any manufacturing work flow. Another, decisions made by people drive processes in a transactional environment.
One important difference is:
In Six Sigma for Manufacturing, much has been made of the normal curve and reducing variation (thus narrowing the width of the normal curve and changing its center or mean point) as a key indicator of success.
In the transactional world, time, money and “counts” are the most accessible points of measurement. In terms of actual continuous measurement, time is virtually the only factor consistently available; financial measurements will almost always be lagging indicators.
Because of these differences, the Six Sigma team for transactional organizations need to do some practical changes. The team needs to create an enhanced process mapping and process design techniques.
Machine-oriented tools such as gauge R and R can be dropped. Non-parametric statistics and attribute statistics become relatively more important than “normal” statistics. Design of Experiments (DOE) assumes a completely different role in the transactional environment. Frequently, DOE is completely left out of Transactional Six Sigma curricula, because it creates its own set of unique problems. Additional training in subjects such as team building, team leadership and change management provides essential and critical tools for achieving lasting change and sustaining performance improvement.
Unique Challenges for Six Sigma in the Transactional Environment
