Six Sigma is a quality management program applying statistical methods to business processes. It can improve operating efficiency, reduced variation, defects, and waste. It started in the United States with Motorola then adopted by GE, Allied Signal, Texas Instruments, Inc., and many other American-based successful companies.
Already becoming widespread in the US, the strongest economy in the world, can Europe and UK be far behind? There are already successful Six Sigma deployments within UK operations. GDA (which is admittedly co-owned by GE and Marconi), Black & Decker, and Raytheon Marine have proved the methodology to be a valid approach for UK industry Smallpiece Enterprises.
Despite the many well-documented improvements, the last government white paper on competitiveness shows that UK industry is still failing to match the performance of major overseas competition, in terms of productivity, efficiency and quality. Productivity is 20-40 per cent behind the US and the other leading European nations and the gap with France and Germany is not closing.
I am sure Six Sigma deployments in every country face challenges. I’v read that in the Asia-Pacific area, Indian companies are slowly going into Six Sigma. This brought me to my own country, the Philippines. As multinationals came and started competing with locals, many organizations have looked for that one thing that will make them more competitive. They have probably tried all the quality management strategies, from ISO, Five S, Kaizen, and Six Sigma, in the hope that these methodologies will improve key processes areas such as high scrap rates and costly waste, under-utilized capacity, and slow cycle times due to high-process variation.
My succeeding entries will explore the deployment of Six Sigma in Philippine-based service and manufacturing companies. I will gather all the information through interviews and research. Among the companies that I will be studying are:
Citibank, a recognized leader in arranging financing and providing financial services for the sovereign and the public utility sector as well as top tier corporates, multinationals and other financial institutions.
Unionbank, among the industry’s best in key performance measures: absolute profit, cost-to-income ratio, return on equity, return on assets, revenue/expense ratios, market capitalization, and earnings per share.
Cemex, Inc., a leading global producer and marketer of quality cement and ready-mix concrete products.
Samsung, a global consumer electronics powerhouse
The Coca-Cola Export Corporation, manufacturer of concentrate for soft drinks.
Toshiba, Information Equipment, Inc., manufacturer of hard disk drives, optical disk drives, printed circuit boards and full assembly of notebook PCs.
Monark Equipment, seller of earthmoving and construction equipment.
Sykes Asia, Inc., a global leader in providing outsourced customer contact management solutions and services in the business process outsourcing (BPO) arena.
Read-Rite Philippines, Inc., one of the world’s leading independent manufacturers of recording heads and related assemblies for computer disk and tape drives and other data storage products.
