Six Sigma and Employees

A Six Sigma program is a kind of activity that requires discipline and cooperation from all concerned. Six Sigma is primarily about changing the culture of an organization’s problem-solving strategy.

In an interview with Barbara Wheat, Executive Director of Six Sigma, Tenneco-Automotive Lake Forest, she said that both management and employees should work hand in hand to achieve a Six Sigma. Get the employees involved in the deployment of the quality program by telling them the purpose and parameters for such action, and its positive effect on the company. That in a nutshell is how the relationship between management, employees, and Six Sigma should be.

“If the purpose behind the deployment is primarily financial, employees should be told about the financial situation of the company and the need for improving the value proposition. If the focus is on improving quality, communications should contain an explanation of customer quality expectations and current level of performance to those expectations, ” Ms. Wheat clarified.

By clearly delineating the purpose, the employees will appreciate their roles in the whole process. Consequently, they will realize that Six Sigma can improve quality that will lead to new business with prospective clients and renewed relationships with existing ones. In fact, based on Ms. Wheat’s experience with her company’s Six Sigma deployment, the quality strategy has greatly improved employees satisfaction. That surely spells a big difference–a happy worker makes for a good worker.

Here are top 10 questions to consider if you are reviewing the potential of a Six Sigma project.

1. What is the problem you are trying to address?
2. What are the potential benefits of solving this problem?
3. Will you be able to quantify these benefits in terms of cost savings, cost avoidance, or improved customer satisfaction if you solve this problem?
4. Do you have the necessary support and commitment from management/ key stakeholders to solve this problem?
5. Is the resolution of this problem achievable given your span of influence (i.e., is the scope of the project reasonable)?
6. What key output variables are needed to measure project success?
7. Do you have a capable system to measure each of these key output variables?
8. What key process input variables are you going to examine to determine the root cause(s) of your problem?
9. Do you have a capable system to measure each of these key input variables?
10. Do you have the appropriate analytical resources (training, software) necessary to solve this problem?

Ask the Expert: Six Sigma and Employees

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Understanding the term Sigma

Derived from statistics, Sigma is now used as a measure in manufacturing and usefully translated to non-manufacturing realms.

Essentially, Sigma denotes the deviation of values from the mean of the population, where the word population describes a collection of objects that share certain general characteristics. You can therefore speak of the population of registered voters, the population of domestically manufactured automobiles, and so on. Also you can refer to the parts created by a given manufacturing process as a population. When individual items in a population are measured regarding specific characteristics, they often exhibit a similar pattern.

Many items are seen to be at or close to a central value, but as you move further away from the central value, the number decreases. For example, there is a large party attended by a mixed group of adults, you would probably find that most people fall into the category of 5?2? to 5?10?. Fewer numbers of individuals would be in the categories 5?0? to 5?2? and 5?10? to 6?0?. Even fewer people, probably a very scant number, would be shorter than 5?0? or taller than 6?0?.

This kind of pattern is called the Normal Distribution: many items in a population cluster at or near a central value, with fewer and fewer items as one moves farther away from the central value with so many different types of populations. When a population exhibits this pattern, it is said to be normally distributed.

Sigma then stands for Standard Deviation. It measures how far away from the population mean values lie. It is specific for a given population and its values may change as the population varies.

After a process has been improved using the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology, you then calculate the process standard deviation and sigma value. These are considered to be short-term values because the data only contains common cause variation — DMAIC projects and the associated collection of process data occur over a period of months, rather than years. Long-term data, on the other hand, contains common cause variation and special (or assignable) cause variation. Because short-term data does not contain this special cause variation, it will typically be of a higher process capability than the long-term data. This difference is the 1.5 sigma shift. Given adequate process data, you can determine the factor most appropriate for your process.

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