Ask anyone about GE and there is a fair chance they will mention Six Sigma. Many are aware of this quality mystery that GE is so well-known for. Six Sigma isn’t a black art, but a simple and practical way of measuring and managing quality and success.
Globalisation and instant access to information, products and services continue to change the way our customers conduct business. In today’s competitive environment there is little room for error. We must delight our customers and relentlessly look for new ways to exceed their expectations. This is why Six Sigma Quality has become such an integral part of our culture.
What is Six Sigma?
First, what it is not? It is not a secret society, a slogan or a cliché. Six Sigma is a highly disciplined process that helps a firm focus on developing and delivering near-perfect products and services.
Why ‘Sigma’? The word is a statistical term that measures how far a given process deviates from perfection. The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many ‘defects’ you have in a process, you can systematically work out how to eliminate them and get as close to ‘zero defects’ as possible. To achieve Six Sigma quality, a process must produce no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. An ‘opportunity’ is defined as a chance for non-conformance, or not meeting the required specifications. This means the need to be nearly flawless in executing key processes.
Key concepts
At its core, Six Sigma revolves around a few key concepts:
– Critical to Quality: attributes most important to the customer;
– Defect: failing to deliver what the customer wants;
– Process Capability: what your process can deliver;
– Variation: what the customer sees and feels;
– Stable Operations: ensuring consistent, predictable processes to improve what the customer sees and feels
– Design for Six Sigma: designing to meet customer needs,requirements and process capability.
Achieving quality for the customer
There are three key elements of quality: customer, process and employee.
– The Customer – Delighting Customers – customers should be at the centre of any business; it is the customer who defines quality. They expect performance, reliability, competitive prices, on-time delivery, service, clear and correct transaction processing and more. In every attribute that influences customer perception, we know that just being good is not enough. Delighting customers is a necessity. Because if you don’t do it, someone else will.
– The Process – Outside-In Thinking – quality requires you look at your business from the customer’s perspective, not your own. In other words, you need to look at processes from the outside in. By understanding the transaction lifecycle from the customer’s needs and processes, you can discover what they are seeing and feeling. With this knowledge, it’s possible to identify areas where you can add value or improvement from the customer perspective.
– The Employee – Leadership Commitment – people create results. At GE, involving all employees is essential to the quality approach. GE is committed to providing opportunities and incentives for employees to focus their talents and energies on satisfying the firm’s customers.
All GE employees are given access to the strategy, statistical tools and techniques of Six Sigma Quality. Training courses are offered at various levels:
– Quality Overview Seminars: basic Six Sigma awareness;
– Team Training: basic tool introduction to equip employees to participate on Six Sigma teams
– Master Black Belt, Black Belt and Green Belt Training: in-depth quality training that includes high-level statistical tools, basic quality control tools, Change Acceleration Process and Flow technology tools
– Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) Training: prepares teams for the use of statistical tools to design it right the first time
Quality is the responsibility of every employee. Every employee must be involved, motivated and knowledgeable if we are to succeed
Customers feel the variance, not the mean
Often, an inside-out view of the business is based on average or mean-based measures of our recent past. Customers don’t judge us on averages; they feel the variance in each transaction, and each product we ship and each service we provide. Six Sigma focuses first on reducing process variation and then on improving the process capability.
Customers value consistent, predictable business processes that deliver world-class levels of quality. This is what Six Sigma strives to produce.
Success with Six Sigma has exceeded our most optimistic predictions. Across the company, associates embrace Six Sigma’s customer-focused, data-driven philosophy and apply it to everything it does. We are building on these successes by sharing best practices across all of its businesses, putting our full power behind the quest for better, faster customer solutions.
Research has shown that firms who successfully implement Six Sigma perform better in virtually every business category, including return on sales, return on investment, employment growth and stock value growth.
But can Six Sigma really work across all businesses? It is clear how a low level of process failure is critical in a healthcare or aerospace industry, but is it really necessary in a service led environment such the financial services? Six Sigma is all about refining, improving and measuring a process. Your level of success may not be 3.4 failures per million, but if working through the process enables you to significantly improve your customer experience and helps to develop products then it has a clear benefit to all businesses.
