Can’t Six Sigma Save GM?
Posted by: meikah | 17 July 2008 | 2:27 am
General Motors (GM) was the company to beat: innovative, efficient, successful! Its growth and success was perhaps unprecedented.
About five years ago, an article on BNET shares how Six Sigma is driving quality at GM, and is enjoying great benefits and savings. Because of DFSS and Six Sigma, GM had increased vehicle quality while lowering costs and improving its products’ reliability and durability.
Fast forward to 2008, GM is set to sell assets, borrow money, and cut jobs to raise up to $15 billion. The company has been having huge problems for years now, and a silver lining is not in the offing.
It’s sad to hear successful companies going downhill. My question now is can’t Six Sigma save GM? Can’t they do a DMAIC?
Update:
GM Cuts: Time to Panic? Depends Who You Ask
Filed under: Manufacturing, Six Sigma, Brand Strategy, GM
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DFSS and Brand Strategy
Posted by: meikah | 13 November 2007 | 3:33 am
Over at CustServ, I wrote about striking a balance between brand experience and customer experience. Today, I found another interesting article on iSixSigma. It talks about incorporating Design for Six Sigma to building brand strategy.
The premise is that while companies work hard to make brand strategies more than just empty promises, they often find themselves stuck in the execution phase.
This is where Six Sigma comes in. The methodology is often viewed, and rightly so, as a versatile, effective framework for connecting executive goals (business strategy), marketing communication (brand promise) and management (operational activities). Here’s an example of a bank working on its brand using Six Sigma.
Consider the case of the business bank that wanted to increase its share in a regional market. The bank used the DMADV roadmap of Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) and adapted it for brand strategy (Table 1). By applying DMADV, the organization realized that to advance from the business strategy to marketplace results, it was necessary to first understand the brand, define the brand promise and identify specific actions required to deliver on it (Define, Measure, Analyze). Finally, the organization needed to make sure that the defined brand promise actually was fulfilled (Design, Verify).
Source:
iSixSigma, Promises of Brand Strategy and Design for Six Sigma
*Photo from Stock.Xchng
