At GE, at the helm of their Six Sigma initiative is their CIO, Gary Reiner. Since GE’s massive Six Sigma initiative in 1996, Mr. Reiner has been at the forefront of GE’s Six Sigma deployment, and oversees the company’s $55 billion of annual sourcing.
The company started with Six Sigma, and it’s interesting to know that GE’s Six Sigma has morphed into Lean Six Sigma. In an interview with Geoff Colvin, senior editor at large for Fortune Magazine, Reiner shares some of his thoughts and plans for the Lean Six Sigma initiative at GE.
Here are some snippets.
What does Jeff Immelt want from you?
Three things. My responsibilities are information technology, Lean Six Sigma, and sourcing.You’ve been in charge of GE’s Six Sigma initiative since it started, in 1996. Are you still getting value out of it?
We’ve been aggressively trying to migrate away from talking about tools and instead to talking about outcomes. Six Sigma is a tool. It is a wonderful tool, but it is a tool. What we’re talking more about as a company is outcomes, and the two outcomes we really want are product reliability and customer responsiveness.So we start with that and work our way back to what tools are needed to make that happen. For product reliability, the Six Sigma tools are sensational. On the responsiveness side, it’s often less about using Six Sigma and more about getting the right people in the room to map out how long it takes for us to do something in front of customers and, using mostly common sense, take out those things that get in the way of meeting our customer needs responsibly.
For example?
In our GE Money business we offer private-label finance to retailers. We are the financing behind jewelry stores and pharmacies and the like. Sad to say, it was taking 63 days from when a retailer contacted us saying it wanted to consider using us as a private-label financier until it could conduct the first transaction with our financing. No one had calculated this before we went on this journey.We did a number of what we call lean workouts, where we get everybody in the room to map out the process, and they got it down from 63 days to one day. The leader of that business was able to go out and have as his marketing campaign, “Enroll today. Transact tomorrow.” When we did that, sales doubled. And there are 30 examples of that throughout the company.
No wonder GE has been successful in their Six Sigma initiatives. They have understood the role of Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma, which is a tool, in their process improvement, and work around that premise. They have a goal, which is product reliability and customer responsiveness, and they have focused their Six Sigma initiative with that end goal in mind.
It’s always about a goal and a focus.
Update:
GE: The Heat on Immelt
