Six Sigma does it again!
Business executives have only one thing in mind and that is to increase the value of their organizations. If they are able to do that, then they are successful. In the leadership pyramid, increasing your organization’s value starts at determining a strategy toward this goal, then identifying a methodology, or infrastructure to best support the strategy, and ends at aligning the methodology or infrastructure with the organizational activities and resources by using the methodology to support the strategy.
Through the years, CEOs have tried every improvement strategies there are in the market, but none of them could address all the issues. I guess no strategy can ever will. Until Six Sigma came. Six Sigma Systems aptly puts it.
In the past ten years a fundamental methodology has emerged and rewarded business leaders with measurable results to the bottom line while simultaneously improving organizational culture. The methodology, Six Sigma, improves the processes that constitute the business engine … Six Sigma eliminates cost and increases value like few other process improvement methodologies have, in part because it forces quantitative measurements on the results of organizational activities. It has been utilized in manufacturing as well as in service and other non-manufacturing environments. It is successful because non-value added expenses often represent up to 50% of an organizations cost structure, thus providing savvy leadership a veritable goldmine of quantifiable opportunity.
Just what makes Six Sigma this effective?
According to the same article, Six Sigma’s merits do not lie merely on its use of statistics. Rather, it also lies on how the methodology acquires critical data and process it using the Six Sigma tools. Common examples of tools used are process mapping, thought process mapping (TPM), failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), Measurement System Evaluation (MSE), design of experiments (DOE), components of variation (COV), techniques for experimenting in noisy environments, and statistical process control (SPC) for process investigation.
Another value of Six Sigma is its organizational structure, which helps the entire organization, regardless of function, can use to identify and capture improvement opportunities. The structure consists of the following elements:
* Project Identification Process
* Leadership Training
* Practitioner Training
* Project Tracking and Support
The article: Increasing Firm Value Using Six Sigma
The statistics and the tools, and the structure of Six Sigma make it easy to implement as a cornerstone to the business strategy. From the structure alone, it is easy to tell that the whole methodology requires the whole organization to be involved and even trained to do it. The focus is not on the process but on the people who will do or undergo the process as well. As a result, the methodology truly becomes a way of doing business for the organization.
