Q&A with Software AG’s Bruce Williams about Six Sigma, Lean, and BPM

We’ve read a lot about BPM lately and how this tool helped many successful companies improve their processes and increase their bottomlines. The next natural question would be, how will BPM fare with Six Sigma and Lean, two methodologies that most successful companies have adopted?

Intelligent Enterprise features Doug Henschen’s Q&A with Software AG’s Bruce Williams. They touched on the most important aspects of Six Sigma, Lean, and how a company can combine the two with BPM.

You’ve written white papers and offered seminars about the opportunity to magnify the benefits of continuous process improvement initiatives such as Six Sigma and Lean with the aid of BPM. Can you start by describing where Six Sigma and Lean have come up short?

As a rule, the Six Sigma practitioner is an industrial engineer, a mechanical engineer or maybe a business person. They are not IT people, they may not understand IT, and furthermore, when they’ve looked for data and measurement around processes, they haven’t had a lot of success getting it out of IT. The IT department has generally asked them to take a number and get in line because they have had other priorities.

As a result, Six Sigma and Lean practitioners typically collect information on their own and then they measure it, analyze it and design and implement improvements outside of enterprise IT, which means several things. Number one, there’s a lot of redundant gathering of information and a lot of problems calibrating the data sources. As a result, they’re spending way too much time in the measurement phase. Secondly, when these continuous process improvement efforts get back to the control phase, there’s no closed loop. Six Sigma and Lean teams tell people what to do to optimize a process, but it’s like herding cats [because there are no measures or control mechanisms in place].

Finally, Six Sigma and Lean initiatives have tended to affect human-centric systems, but not the system behind the iron curtain of IT. In the early years of a Six Sigma or Lean initiative you could make a lot of hay just fixing human-centric problems without ever touching IT, but the next-highest level of low-hanging fruit involves enterprise IT.

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Source:
Intelligent Enterprise, a Six Sigma Zone featured link

*Photo from Stock.Xchng

Filed under: Processes, BPM, Lean

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How Six Sigma Can Better Assess Performance Evaluation

Without a clear measurement to evaluate performance, management could only focus on conformance and nonconformance minus the common cause. And according to Forrest Breyfogle III, this method of evaluating performance can drive the wrong behaviors among employees.

Breyfogle wrote an article for BPM Mag, and discussed there how Six Sigma can drive better management reports by having good metrics to evaluate performance. He suggests an approach, which he calls Smarter Six Sigma Solutions (S4) or “Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE).” It can open managers’ eyes to ways in which the metrics they’ve chosen are driving the wrong employee behaviors, and can help them focus improvement efforts on actions that can truly impact performance. He gives interesting real-life examples, from which we can really learn from.

This part here in the article pretty sums up Breyfogle’s ideas:

Generally speaking, though, organizations can achieve more gains by continuously working to mitigate common-cause problems by improving their basic processes. Effective, long-lasting improvements to processes are not made by firefighting. They require the examination of process data over a period of stability to determine what should be done differently in the long term.

Presenting performance data in traditional management reports, with simple year-to-year comparisons of metrics, may identify results that are out of line with targets, but it does little to help executives determine how to respond to those results. How can a company fix poor performance when it doesn’t know what caused that performance?

Process improvement projects in Six Sigma utilize a define-measure-analyze-improve-control (DMAIC) road map to investigate the causes behind nonconforming processes using both statistical and nonstatistical techniques. Such an analysis can lead to long-lasting, sustainable improvement, and taking an S4/IEE approach to reporting on the analysis expands the positive impact that companies see in their top-level performance metrics.

Source:
BPM Mag, “Common Cause: How Six Sigma Can Drive Better Management Reports”

*Photo from MorgueFile

Filed under: Tools/Toolkits, Processes, Data Analysis, DMAIC, BPM, Forrest W. Breyfogle III

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Six Sigma and Process Management

From that title alone, we can assume that there should be a happy marriage between Six Sigma and process management. After all, Six Sigma is all about process management and improvement. The success of any business depends on how well it is able to manage its processes, and improve it.

The premise for Six Sigma or Lean is for a company to do only the relevant processes to save and be more efficient.

According to an article on BNET titled, The Convergence of Six Sigma and Process Management, process management involves mapping a process, determining the inputs and outputs, linking one process output to another process input, characterizing their performance, and then attempting to either monitor or control them. Six Sigma, for its part, is a structured approach that recognizes the inability of a process or business characteristic to meet its requirements. In many cases, a near intuitive or logical solution is available; these types of solutions are one of the many benefits derived from a process management activity.

When the two concepts converge:

Six Sigma, with its DMAIC approach to problem solving, tends to be very constant in terms of the phases used. Business Process Management (BPM) tends to have stages of completion with potentially increasing levels of activity.

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If your organization has started with business process management (BPM) before starting Six Sigma, BPM will help you identify where it is most beneficial to apply Six Sigma. This is because Process Management provides the identification of problematic areas of the business and incapable process outputs. It is on these “incapable” processes and process outputs that the power of Six Sigma is focused to achieve improvement.

If an organization has implemented Six Sigma and then launches a BPM activity, BPM is a
catalyst for improvement. Implementing Six Sigma first provides an appreciation for the
importance of process, the need to organically find Six Sigma projects and the need to manage
processes for stability and predictability.

Continue reading about the Six Sigma Methodology in Harmony with BPM.

*Photo from MorgueFile

Filed under: Processes, BPM

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