Six Sigma in the Workplace

How many of you have deployed Six Sigma throughout the whole organization? By throughout, I mean launching Six Sigma projects in all processes of your organization from production, purchasing, finance, human resource, marketing, sales, down to utility personnel. Well, if you did, then congratulations! You are among the very few who take this holistic approach to Six Sigma.

As Mario Wilson-Perez, who worked for seven years as division engineering manager of Motorola’s statistical methods department, writes in his article “Six Sigma Strategies: Creating Excellence in the Workplace” published in Quality Digest Online, “A true Six Sigma organization produces not only excellent products but also maintains highly efficient production and administrative systems that work effectively with the company’s other service processes.”

A manufacturer, for instance, may implement Six Sigma for outgoing product quality through 100-percent final inspection. But production processes still may run at low yields with high scrap ratios and defects. Implementing a Six Sigma program in manufacturing also means maintaining in-process yields around 99.9999998 percent, defective rates below 0.002 parts per million and virtually eradicating defects, rework and scrap.

In administrative processes, Six Sigma may mean not only the obvious reduction of cycle time during production but, more importantly, optimizing response time to inquiries, maximizing the speed and accuracy with which inventory and materials are supplied, and foolproofing such support processes from errors, inaccuracies and inefficiency.

In a more holistic scale therefore, a Six Sigma level should be implemented in the entire workplace or organization. Perez’s article outlined some interesting points on how an organization can apply this wholistic approach.

Initially, he suggested that an executive directive be disseminated to all employees from production people, to administration, and to service providers. It will establish a common quality goal (i.e., reduce defect or waste in everything they do) for everyone in the organization. The directive requires all employees to participate in a day-long course outlining the “Five W’s” of Six Sigma. This course explains the who, what, where, why and when of the organization’s new way of doing business.

Since an organization has technical and nontechnical processes, Perez recommends developing a standard methodology for optimizing nontechnical processes to Six Sigma levels throughout the organization. This methodology should include process delineation, index measurement generation, data collection for quantifying the process, among others. Continue reading…

I so wish this is the case for all those companies that claim to be working toward Six Sigma. One time, I called up a company’s hotline. This company was on the list of Six Sigma companies. I called to schedule an interview with them to know about their Six Sigma experience. But to my disappointment, I had to make several calls before I reached the person involved in the project. In fact, my call was not picked up the first time. I had to dial the number three times. When finally somebody answered, the receiver didn’t know what Six Sigma was. I had to do some explaining. Then he transferred my call. My call was transferred five times! Can you imagine that? That is why, I believe a holistic approach to Six Sigma will be a lot more beneficial to the organization and less humiliating.

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Rewarding a Successful Six Sigma Quality Program

Working with or without a structure often affects the outcome of a project. We all know that for a project to be effectively planned and controlled it needs to be structured into a number of main stages. And the people working on it should follow some kind of an organization. For the Six Sigma Quality Program structure or organizational architecture click here.

However, in project deployment or management it is not enough to be able to set up a structure and assign roles. For the structure or organization to work and work successfully at that, you have to set up some rewards system. Just to emphasize the importance of rewards to successful ventures, an article (Success Through Project Management) in the Project Management blog by Eleine Ramos placed “senior management always give out rewards to successful project ventures” at top 2 of the survery results. The survey had 87 senior project management practitioners as subjects. Check out the blog for more info on project management.

So how does rewards and recognition go? Charles Waxer writing for an isixsigma article says that rewards and recognition vary depending on the role of an individual in the project.

Green Belts may appreciate gift certificates, cash, and stock options. But according to Waxer, public congratulations in front of peers may prove to be more inspiring and compute salary adjustments accordingly as well.

Black Belts and Master Black Belts may be rewarded by having their salary and bonus structure tied to the number of projects and benefit of those projects to the business bottom line.

Process Owner’s compensation (salary and bonus) must be tied directly to quality efforts within their organization.

Quality Leader’s performance-based compensation (salary and bonus) might work.

CEOs who are into the project full time can tie the compensation of his direct reports to Quality deliverables.

Human nature craved for some rewards and recognition. Although some people can work well gratis, reality tells us that inspiration can also come from monetary means. That’s why Waxer says, “Don’t be shy about asking to tie compensation to your Six Sigma Quality initiative. It’s the only way you’ll truly have your entire organization focused around the customer and the quality of your processes and deliverables.”

And I agree!

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Relying on Black Belts to Deliver the Goods

Among the top news in the Six Sigma community are two leading manufacturing companies that have appointed certified Six Sigma Black Belts to deliver the goods so to speak.

Accuride Corporation, one of the largest and most diversified manufacturers and suppliers of commercial vehicle components in North America, appointed Ben Laaper to Vice President / Global Sourcing.

As VP, Laaper will be responsible for procurement and logistics at all Accuride business units. Part of his expanded role is the taking on the role of driving Accuride’s continual improvement processes surrounding procurement reengineering. Many believe that Laaper is highly qualified for the job. Laaper has more than 30 years of procurement and sourcing experience and is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt of MoreSteam University. Read the complete press release here.

Hayes Lemmerz International, Inc., leading automotive supplier, appointed Fred Bentley to the new position of Chief Operating Officer and President of the Global Wheel Group. The appointment comes in time for the company’s strategic realignment of its wheel businesses to strengthen coordination and synergies worldwide. The realignment brings together the company’s North American and International Wheel Groups, forming the Global Wheel Group.

Like Laaper, many also believe that Bentley can do justice to his new post. Bentley has been part of Lemmerz’s growth overseas and is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, and one of his expertise is lean manufacturing. Read the complete press release here.

Just what is it about Six Sigma Black Belts that people rely on them to take on serious roles such as driving companies to succeeding further? Two of my previoius posts (Naming the Six Sigma Masters and Doing Six Sigma Right) have discussed Black Belts trainings. A Black Belt training is serious training. Before you get certified, you need to complete certain number of hours and complete a project. So that when you come out of the training you are ready for process improvement projects.

Thomas Pyzdek, author of the Six Sigma Handbook, listed down the 101 Things A Six Sigma Black Belt Should Know. Among them are…

1. In general, a Six Sigma Black Belt should be quantitatively oriented.
2. With minimal guidance, the Six Sigma Black Belt should be able to use data to convert broad generalizations into actionable goals.
3. The Six Sigma Black Belt should be able to make the business case for attempting to accomplish these goals.
4. The Six Sigma Black Belt should be able to develop detailed plans for achieving these goals.
5. The Six Sigma Black Belt should be able to measure progress towards the goals in terms meaningful to customers and leaders.
6. The Six Sigma Black Belt should know how to establish control systems for maintaining the gains achieved through Six Sigma.
7. The Six Sigma Black Belt should understand and be able to communicate the rationale for continuous improvement, even after initial goals have been accomplished.
8. The Six Sigma Black Belt should be familiar with research that quantifies the benefits firms have obtained from Six Sigma.
9. The Six Sigma Black Belt should know or be able to find the PPM rates associated with different sigma levels (e.g., Six Sigma = 3.4 PPM)
10. The Six Sigma Black Belt should know the approximate relative cost of poor quality associated with various sigma levels (e.g., three sigma firms report 25% COPQ). Continue reading.

This sure sounds like a tough job to do. But the training will equip the person to do it and do it well. For companies who believe that process improvement can only happen through Six Sigma should seriously consider a Black Belt training for their highly capable employees.

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Being Smarter about Six Sigma?

One article on the OPTIMIZE, the online magazine for business strategy & execution for CIOs, took Six Sigma to another level.

In the article, Forrest W. Breyfogle and David Enck talked about the Smarter Six Sigma Solutions, or S4. It is designed to improve business processes and strategic planning. And IT (information technology) plays a major role in it, as it relies heavily on converting data into usable information.

The core of any S4 business strategy are two types of high-level business metrics: satellite-level and 30,000-foot-level views. Satellite-level metrics include earnings per share, growth, return on investment capital, and sales. Wall Street analysts and CEOs use them. On the other hand, 30,000-foot-level metrics are operational. They include costs such as day’s sales outstanding, equipment, and labor; cycle time; efficiency; inventory; and waste.

Smarter Six Sigma Solutions, S4, can benefit a company in the following ways:

1. It can devise a process that lets the management team map its goals to specific projects. In this way, the team can check the implementation of its plan by tracking the execution of key projects.

2. It can incorporate the DMAIC approach to project implementation.

3. It can help create customers and cash by improving the way it does business, providing a structured approach to problem solving and metric tracking. One major step toward this is obtaining the VOC, or voice of the customer. Customer here mean both internal (i.e. employees or those directly involved in the project) and external customers (clients or suppliers).

Like in Six Sigma methodology, VOC is at the heart of S4. This is where IT or technology comes in. IT can track the VOC and encourage the company to ask the right questions. It can also convert the resulting data into usable information, then track and disseminate it providing a system to help answer the questions. Data such as defect rates, delivery performance, and service metrics can help managers make decisions regarding suppliers.

The IT department can also make available meaningful and useful data to the entire supply chain by developing an enterprise resource planning system or ERP.

Read on: Six Sigma Goes Corporate

No doubt about it, technology really plays an important role in doing business these days, which should be the case. Technology, in fact, has leveled the field. Products or services now have become equal in terms of efficiency and efficacy because of technology. As a result, marketing has become more than a department in an organization. It has become a philosophy. People now more often than not choose products not so much for their brand, but for how well the products have been advertised or marketed. More importantly, how well the company handle them when they go and buy the products or services.

That is why, the VOC tool in Six Sigma can be the key to a successful business. You can serve your customers well, if you know them well. You can better produce products or launch a service if you know which ones the market need or will need. That’s how to be smart in the business.

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Moving with Six Sigma

So far we’ve applied Six Sigma to immobile processes of a relatively stationary workforce. Yet, even with this kind workforce, deploying Six Sigma is not done without hitches. Companies whose earnings rely heavily on mobile workforce, such as field sales and service, have realized that deploying Six Sigma although highly beneficial is a lot more challenging. They’ve cited four factors that conspire against the use of Six Sigma in mobile workforces.

1. Six Sigma will get in the way of the worker’s productivity and creativity.
2. Transactional services lack available data and defined processes.
3. Six Sigma run counter to the way field staff do their work. Mobile workforce are big on results, thus they are highly autonomous and tend to keep their selling secrets if they can.
4. Communication, training, and project work is difficult when staff are not regularly together in a centralized office.

Lynda Finn and Sue Reynard came up with a research titled “Six Sigma and the Mobile Workforce.” According to their research, there are four ways to make Six Sigma work with mobile staff.

First, relate Six Sigma to their daily targeted outcomes and business goals. Like any other individual or group, they will welcome a project that they know will bring more good than bad. Art Larson, general manager of U.S. services operations at General Electric (GE) Medical Systems, said that tying projects with business goals for a sales or service force means defining business goals around price erosion, profitability, cost, productivity, and cash. Tim Bates, director of business process development at 3M, echoed the same sentiment. In fact, his group builds a linkage tree-like diagram showing the corporate Y’s, the outcomes they’re trying to drive, and their projects and tools. This way, Bates said, “we can look at the gaps and build gap closure strategies around process improvements and the eventual linkage to tools. That way we can define the critical Y’s for each business.”

Second, support the field staff. Assure them feel that Six Sigma will boost their performance in the field. Therefore choosing feasible Six Sigma projects and a workable timeframe are two important considerations. Larson continues, “So we did projects on things like margin, productivity, time management and revenue growth. Those were the types of critical Y’s that meant something to sales staff.” This will determine the need for some assigned Black Belts to do the legwork. At this point, Larson said that using simple tools such as SIPOC is also a key. With SIPOC, they can map out the basic relationships between suppliers, inputs, process steps, outputs, and customers.

Third, automate data gathering and process logistics. Thanks to advanced technology, field staff can now rely on personal digital assistants. These devices are equipped with mobile task automation (MTA) software applications designed to permit access to corporate computing infrastructure to simplify, speed up, and error proof the everyday business transactions. Making data collection simple and easy reduces delays in performing tasks and achieving results. Moreover, it improves communication, customer service, and processes and systems.

Fourth, pay attention to people’s (in this case the field staff’s) reaction to these changes. Emphasize the human aspect to these changes instead of the technological ones. Make the people understand that you are doing all these changes to make their work easier and more productive.

Achieving a Six Sigma level on mobile transactions is very crucial to a company’s overall business performance. Especially because mobile workforces are people who spend most of their time dealing with customers face to face. The focus therefore should be on delivering what customers really care about or in Six Sigma parlance, the key outcomes or critical Y’s. Customer is king in Six Sigma. And if you are serious in getting ahead with your business, then you should know that you also have to make customers the very reason of your existence. The study of Finn and Reynard tells us that Six Sigma can work with any process in your organization. It provides the kind of leverage that your company needs in a highly competitive world. In the same breath, you should not lose focus on the more important factor in doing business, and that is human resource. Keep in mind to put people on top of any process improvement undertaking.

Read more:
Tips and Technology for Six Sigma in Mobile Workforces

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Making It to the Prestigious 2006 Six Sigma Excellence Awards

In an ASQ interview with Robert W. Galvin, he said that receiving industry awards is a good way to build reputation for dependability and quality. Galvin is chair of the executive committee of Motorola Inc. and was chair and CEO of the company in the mid-1980s when it launched its Six Sigma Quality program This program earned for Motorola its first Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The company is also the first large company to receive the award.

That award opened the eyes of other companies about Six Sigma methodology. Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award requires candidates to share their methods to other companies, and Galvin shared what they were doing at Motorola. Amidst apprehension of Management, Galvin thought it wise to share their quality system. He argued that the other companies may be competitors but they will also be their suppliers and customers. Galvin was right. Motorola in a way became the Six Sigma yardstick.

In another interview by Six Sigma IQ with Black Belt Gordon Millar, member of the winning team from ScottishPower, winner of the Best Defect Elimination in Service & Transaction at Six Sigma Summit 2005, Millar said that receiving an award absolutely reinforces and validates their efforts, which will surely merit appreciation from top management. This is their project in a nutshell.

There is an expectation of customers that they will go through a seamless process when setting up their billing, but we knew that this was actually quite a fractured process. Our baseline, what we were getting on our billing record, was approximately 50%, which was quite poor. Essentially we wanted to measure the baseline against 45 days of the customer coming live with us; we would expect them to have a billing record, but that was only happening about 50% of the time. So there were masses of opportunities there for us to look at in these fractured processes, but we also wanted to create the full end-to-end effort within the business areas, align some of our support services and obviously increase the capacity of the systems that support the registration process.

If participating and winning awards have this impact internally and externally, it is not surprising therefore that companies launch Six Sigma projects and hope to be recognized for them. Recognition also inspires people to do well, work harder, and sacrifice more. If used to its fullest advantage, it can fuel creativity and excellent work from people. Sadly, though, many companies miss out on this. We often hear of employees complain of passivity and complaisance from employers. I have friends who share that they only hear from their boss after they’ve messed up. Why wait for outside giving bodies to reward your people? You can also do that in your own backyard so to speak. Regularly reward people in your organization for every good deal they do. In turn, they will do excellent work over and over again.

This year’s Six Sigma Excellence Awards will again honor successful companies.

Best Design for Six Sigma Project (Sponsored by SBTI)
Delphi Corporation, Steering Division (Manual R&P Gear Rack Rattle Elimination)
Delphi Electronics & Safety (Six Sigma Capability of High Q Printed Capacitors)
Dominion Resources (Clover Power Station Coal Management Process)
MeadWestvaco (Atlanta Print Cut Safety Improvement)

The complete list of other finalists here

The 7th Annual Six Sigma Summit Award 2006 will be on January 24 – 25, 2006 at Wyndham Miami Beach Resort, Miami Beach, Florida. Its theme is regeneration. The speaker is no other than former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Read more

On the other hand the 7th Annual Six Sigma Summit and Excellence Awards will be on April 24 – 27, 2006 at The New Connaught Rooms, London, UK. This event will tell you how to drive your process excellence from deployment to unconscious competence. This year’s honored keynote is none other than the legendary Sir John Harvey-Jones, who not only transformed ICI into one the major super powers in his industry, but also sorted out hundreds of other companies’ process problems through his role as the BBC’s “Troubleshooter”. Conference agenda is here.

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More of Lean Six Sigma at Work

Less than a month ago, Solectron Corporation, a leading provider of electronics manufacturing and integrated supply chain services, announced its expansion efforts in Timisoara, Romania. By establishing the Design and Services Center there, the Timisoara facility becomes a fully operational manufacturing center in Europe. It will focus on advanced collaborative design and engineering services. Among its core targets are reduced costs, improved quality, and increased time-to-market strategies.

Solectron’s Timisoara facility has been working on high-quality processes. Its commitment to total quality management led it to successfully implement the Solectron Production System(TM) (SPS), the company’s industry-leading Lean Six Sigma methodology.

The SPS was developed with no less than the the world-renowned Lean consulting group, Shingijutsu. with the focused guidance of Shingijutsu’s founder and president Chichiro Nakao, the partnership began in February 2004. The work started on Solectron’s Lean teams and customers in Milpitas, California; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Hillsboro, Oregon. Each site conducted Kaizen weeks, which include site assessments and side-by-side improvement activities to clean up waste and generate more value for customers. Lean initiatives began with the low-volume and high-volume manufacturing location, a repair site and an enclosure facility.

Nakao’s consulting work focuses on moving fast and assessing company facilities and supply chains in a brutally honest way. Nakao believes, “if people learn to see, they can change the very fabric of how their company operates.” As a result, Solectron immediately experienced the fruits of its labor: on one sheet-metal line in, changeover time was reduced by 99 percent in less than four days. In less than a day in, floor space on a large assembly line was reduced by 40 percent – nearly 700 square feet.

Solectron Corporation is on its way to the top, thanks to Management commitment to Lean Six Sigma methodology, which have translated into high-quality products and services, benefits and savings for the company. Not only is it very successful, it is also high on social responsibility. The European Union’s Reduction of Hazardous Substances is set to take effect on July 1, 2006, and already Solectron Timisoara offers lead-free manufacturing to meet RoHS requirements.

Another, the company also lends support especially in terms of Lean manufacturing efforts to other companies.

No doubt about it, Solectron has been working only with the best. The many awards that it received, among them the Solectron’s Collaborative Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management and the International Quality Crown Award for Corporate Excellence and Leadership by the Business Initiative Directions (BID), an organization renowned for its expertise in the analysis of quality programs worldwide.

Articles
Solectron Opens Design and Engineering Services Center in Timisoara, Romania to Serve OEMs Worldwide
World-Class Experts Bring Toyota to Solectron

Related News
Solectron Drives Lean Six Sigma Manufacturing to its Suppliers
Solectron Signs Agreement to Provide THALES Group with Global Manufacturing Services

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Putting Lean Six Sigma to Work

What I am going to tell you here is a story about a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and how he helped his company achieved a $400,000 savings.

The company was a mid-sized electronics manufacturing company with headquarters outside of California. It then opened a facility in Mexico to assemble Printed Circuit Boards or PCB’s. Like any newly opened facility, its initial objective was to have a smooth product transition and to prepare for potential product quality problems. It did not plan to assemble large quantities of PC Boards.

Nevertheless, the company had the good judgment to send one of its high potential engineers to the San Diego State University-College of Extended Studies (SDSU-CES) Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification Program. As fates would have it, the smart engineer’s initial weeks of coursework where he began his required SDSU-supervised Lean Six Sigma project coincided with the company’s operations in Mexico.

Soon enough, the company was producing PC Boards in larger numbers at the Mexico facility. The significantly increased production sent the assembly line running at full capacity and with two shifts. The company had to hire more people to meet production goals. Compounding this dilemma was the introduction of two new high-demand products.

Then came in the Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Candidate who understood immediately what to do. To meet this challenge, he knew he must start with two of the main tools in his Lean Toolkit: Single Minute Exchange of Dyes (SMED) and Line Balancing. He knew he would also use the statistics of Six Sigma to measure the “before and after-effects” of his Lean efforts.

Lean Tool #1: Single Minute Exchange of Dyes (SMED)
SMED’s main objective is to reduce the time it takes to prepare a machine (the so-called “changeover time”) to produce a second product after being used to make a different initial product. By reducing the time it takes to do a changeover, companies can save time and then apply that “new” time to produce more PC Boards.

At the Mexican facility, changeovers in the production line involved waiting until production of one model was complete before starting the changeover process. A SMED analysis revealed that some of the changeover activities could be done while the production line was still running, saving time that could then be used to create more boards. By applying SMED to the production line, our Lean Six Sigma Black Belt candidate and his team reduced the changeover time from 29 minutes to 11 minutes — a 62% reduction.

Lean Tool #2: Line Balancing
This is a technique that helps identify how the work load required of different equipment can slow down production processes. Once these “bottlenecks” are recognized, line balancing equalizes the workload between machines so each machine operates more efficiently, in this case, to produce more PC Boards.

Again our candidate and his team discovered that a particular machine, “The Topaz”, was causing a bottleneck in the production line. After identifying the bottleneck, their next step was to balance the workload between Topaz and a second machine doing similar production work. The team accomplished this goal by giving the second machine, “The Emerald”, more mounts upon which to solder the boards and programming the order of the mounts, so the machine could operate more efficiently. After several trial and error runs, the team successfully balanced both machines. In time, production capacity grew from 55 boards/hour to 61 boards/hour.

All this gargantuan work of course meant nothing to the company if the bosses of our candidate didn’t see green cash flowing into the coffers. So our candidate completed his six sigma analysis and found that in just three months he had created a total accrued savings of $122, 995 for the company. He estimated, too, the total Year 1 expected savings from this single Lean Six Sigma Project as $396,650. No doubt about it; his SDSU Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification Program was worth every dime.

Full story and information about the SDSU-CES Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification Program here.

These are the kind of stories that Management would want to hear over and over again. While it is true that Six Sigma methodology has the highest potential of bringing in dollars to the company, training for it is quite expensive. But then again, if you think about it, the rewards more than compensate for the expenses incurred during the training phase. I think the crucial part here is deciding on either to train employees or hire consultants. Doing one or the other has its inherent pluses and minuses. I guess the company’s bigger challenge is to commit to go for Six Sigma every step of the way.

Filed under: Lean Six Sigma

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Six Sigma the Pan-European Way

The widening of the European Union and the introduction of its single-currency, Euro, has definitely strengthened that region’s economy. A result of a strong economy are big companies or organizations that most likely have intercultural settings. These companies, called pan-European companies, have centralized organizational structure to serve regional and local sales and marketing outposts. And this is the new business model that’s taking hold across the continent.

Now you can just imagine the impact of the varying national cultures and the strength of national perspectives in these companies. The challenge to address this issue becomes heightened for companies trying to effect an organizational change such as Six Sigma or Lean across the business.

Thomas Bertels, partner and director for the Americas of Valeocon Management Consulting, said that you can actually address such issues.

Foremost, you need to look closely at the main issue. Because these organizations usually emerge from mergers or acquisitions and adopt a centralized business model, redundant positions are eliminated. The central group makes most of the decisions, while the country organization implements what was decided on a central level. Centralized functions often include finance, human resources, marketing, distribution, purchasing, engineering, information systems and quality. Local organizations often turn into mere sales organizations.

If you think about it, this centralization could mean big savings for the company. However, many have realized that the cost of complexity of the system offsets the savings (More on this). More importantly, they face the following challenges when trying to improve its process through Six Sigma:

1. How should the deployment approach be adapted to local needs?
2. What is the role of local management versus central management?
3. How will Six Sigma impact the central functions?

Normally, if you are to deploy Six Sigma, you work from the top to the bottom. You involve Management, which will in turn spread the word so to speak down the ranks. In a pan-European setting however this cannot be the case. Questions such as:

How does one select high-impact projects when processes are controlled by central decisions but the cost are at the local level?
To whom should the Black Belts report?
Will local management be able to backfill candidates now reporting into a central group?
And to what extent will the central message for why the company is launching Six Sigma be adapted to the situation in the local market?

Every manager with pan-European responsibility should consider the trade-offs:

Standardization versus adaptation
Optimization versus ownership
Speed versus sustainability
(Read more)

A Six Sigma deployment therefore must take into consideration the structure of an organization. It is not enough to say that people are willing to be trained or that the company’s processes are in dire need of improvement that you plunge right away into the Six Sigma pool. To know if your organization is ready for Six Sigma you might want to refer to my previous post here.

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Six Sigma at Batelco

As wont during start of the year, companies or organizations announce their plans of improving processes to satisfy customers more and usher in more growth for the company. One of the many companies that are turning to Six Sigma to achieve that is Bahrain Telecommunications Company (BATELCO), the largest company by market capitalization in the Bahrain Stock Exchange.

TradeArabia News Service as posted at isixsigma reports that 2006 will be a banner year for Batelco as the company invests more than BD50 million ($132.6 million) in the broadband infrastructure, new world class data centers, additional access to the web via a landing station (a first in Bahrain) and investment in Falcon cable systems and additional base stations for improved mobile coverage.

Batelco will be introducing Six Sigma process improvement methodologies to streamline customer service, product development, billing, and various IT processes aimed at more responsive customer care and a ‘single view’ of the customer.

According to Peter Kaliaropoulos, the company’s chief executive, people will witness Batelco’s best performance yet as the most competitive, best performing, and customer driven communications companies in the Middle East.

Now it is my new year wish that other telecommunications company would follow suit. I’ve written about Bechtel Telecommunications and its honored innovative Six Sigma project.

Isn’t it annoying not to be able to reach persons, or receive calls during this high-tech times. Even I had the misfortune of calling hotlines that are not exactly hot–you wait forever for it to be picked up. I know of some people, too, who complain of choppy connections in their wireless facilities. I am confident though that with Six Sigma services will greatly improve.

Filed under: Services, Six Sigma Organizations, Telecommunications

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