Stiff competition pushes companies to do better and work their way to the customers’ heart to gain that competitive edge.
To achieve that edge, companies need to meet customers expectations such as high quality, competitive prices, and exceptional customer service.
Many companies have turned to Six Sigma help them meet customer requirements by eliminating defects.
AssociatedContent (AC), puts out four points that justify the need for Six Sigma.
- Understanding the customer’s expectations and translating the same into quantifiable measurements. Simply stated, what are your customer’s needs? If you are a credit card company, perhaps your customers want payments posted faster. A Six Sigma Practitioner would seek to define faster in terms of days, hours, or minutes by identifying and contacting the customer base.
- Using data to understand if the current process performance is capable of meeting the customer’s expectations. Once customers are identified and expectations defined, it is time to determine if the current process is capable of meeting the customer’s expectations 99.999966% of the time or at Six Sigma. If the process is not capable of performing at Six Sigma, subject matter experts and process participants are assembled in a team to understand “why.”
- Validating the root causes that hinder a process from performing as expected. After root causes have been identified, either current process data or historical data is collected and analyzed to determine true root causes. In the credit card example above, the team may have identified that posting delays occur as a result of payments being sent to the wrong processing center. Data would then be collected to verify if this is correct.
- Implementing solutions and establish control measurements. Customer don’t experience the average, they only feel the variation. Therefore, after validating actual root causes, solutions are identified and implemented that reduce or eliminate process variation. To complete the DMAIC process, controls are then put in place to sustain the improvements.
Source:
(AC), “The Buzz about Six Sigma” link provided by Six Sigma Zone.
