While fads bubble up organically, management fashions are manufactured and promulgated by consultants and business schools who profit from their adoption. Six Sigma was a classic management fashion, Abrahamson says, and GE was its leading model, a high-performing company touted by consultants eager to help other firms implement the system.
As a result, it spread widely. And as with all fashions, once Six Sigma was picked up by the masses, fashionable companies lost interest and moved on to the next big thing. An obsession with efficiency, researchers have discovered pdf , can come at the expense of invention.
Six Sigma was born out of the theories of a small group of mid-century engineers who became apostles of quality control. Chief among them was W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician who traveled to Japan to teach manufacturing techniques in Japan, in desperate need to reinvent its industry in the aftermath of World War II, was eager to learn, and the companies that adopted his techniques of statistical process control saw enormous gains.
Deming became a hero to Japanese industry and the Deming Prize is still awarded by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers to companies that master his methods. Only by closely studying outputs could managers understand if defects were the product of random chance, or flaws in manufacturing equipment or raw materials.
The process was applied continually to narrow the variability in finished products. Deming believed quality control was an organization-wide imperative, and insisted on involving CEOs when he worked with companies. He pushed corporations to break down barriers of communication between workers and managers, and to eliminate production quotas and targets that could compromise the process.
By the s, Japanese automobiles and electronics surpassed US products in quality and reputation, and American manufacturers took note. After a presentation by Bossidy received an enthusiastic response among GE managers, Welch was ready to take the plunge. No one could be promoted to management without at least green belt training, and candidates could be rejected if their faith wavered.
By , GE boasted that some 80, employees had received Six Sigma training pdf , and completed , Six Sigma projects since the system was adopted. It seemed to produce results. Six Sigma is a method that provides organizations tools to improve the capability of their business processes.
This increase in performance and decrease in process variation helps lead to defect reduction and improvement in profits, employee morale, and quality of products or services. The differing definitions below have been proposed for Six Sigma, but they all share some common threads:.
Philosophy: The philosophical perspective of Six Sigma views all work as processes that can be defined, measured, analyzed, improved, and controlled. Processes require inputs x and produce outputs y. If you control the inputs, you will control the outputs. Set of tools: The Six Sigma expert uses qualitative and quantitative techniques or tools to drive process improvement.
Six Sigma professionals do not totally agree as to exactly which tools constitute the set. DMAIC defines the steps a Six Sigma practitioner is expected to follow, starting with identifying the problem and ending with the implementation of long-lasting solutions. Metrics: In simple terms, Six Sigma quality performance means 3.
Six Sigma Quality Performance. Six Sigma focuses on reducing process variation and enhancing process control, whereas lean drives out waste non-value added processes and procedures and promotes work standardization and flow.
The distinction between Six Sigma and lean has blurred, with the term "lean Six Sigma" being used more and more often because process improvement requires aspects of both approaches to attain positive results. Lean Six Sigma is a fact-based, data-driven philosophy of improvement that values defect prevention over defect detection. It drives customer satisfaction and bottom-line results by reducing variation, waste, and cycle time, while promoting the use of work standardization and flow, thereby creating a competitive advantage.
It applies anywhere variation and waste exist, and every employee should be involved. Lean and Six Sigma both provide customers with the best possible quality, cost, delivery, and a newer attribute, nimbleness.
There is a great deal of overlap between the two disciplines; however, they both approach their common purpose from slightly different angles:.
In addition to establishing a culture dedicated to continuous process improvement, Six Sigma offers tools and techniques that reduce variance, eliminate defects and help identify the root causes of errors, allowing organizations to create better products and services for consumers. While most people associate Six Sigma with manufacturing, the methodology is applicable to every type of process in any industry.
In all settings, organizations use Six Sigma to set up a management system that systematically identifies errors and provides methods for eliminating them. People develop expertise in Six Sigma by earning belts at each level of accomplishment. In the 19th century, German mathematician and physicist Carl Fredrich Gauss developed the bell curve. By creating the concept of what a normal distribution looks like, the bell curve became an early tool for finding errors and defects in a process.
Motorola engineer Bill Smith eventually became one of the pioneers of modern Six Sigma , creating many of the methodologies still associated with Six Sigma in the late s.
The system is influenced by, but different than, other management improvement strategies of the time, including Total Quality Management and Zero Defects.
Experts credit Shewhart with first developing the idea that any part of process that deviates three sigma from the mean requires improvement.
For this, a business needs to understand its customers, their needs, and what drives sales or loyalty. This requires establishing the standard of quality as defined by what the customer or market demands.
Gather data to discover the specific problem area that is to be addressed or transformed. Have clearly defined goals for data collection, including defining the data to be collected, the reason for the data gathering, insights expected, ensuring the accuracy of measurements, and establishing a standardized data collection system. Ascertain if the data is helping to achieve the goals, whether or not the data needs to be refined, or additional information collected. Identify the problem.
Ask questions and find the root cause. Get Rid of the Junk Once the problem is identified, make changes to the process to eliminate variation, thus removing defects. Remove the activities in the process that do not add to the customer value. If the value stream doesn't reveal where the problem lies, tools are used to help discover the outliers and problem areas. Streamline functions to achieve quality control and efficiency. In the end, by taking out the above-mentioned junk, bottlenecks in the process are removed.
Keep the Ball Rolling Involve all stakeholders. Adopt a structured process where your team contributes and collaborates their varied expertise for problem-solving. Six Sigma processes can have a great impact on an organization, so the team has to be proficient in the principles and methodologies used. Hence, specialized training and knowledge are required to reduce the risk of project or re-design failures and ensure that the process performs optimally.
When a faulty or inefficient process is removed, it calls for a change in the work practice and employee approach. A robust culture of flexibility and responsiveness to changes in procedures can ensure streamlined project implementation. The people and departments involved should be able to adapt to change with ease, so to facilitate this, processes should be designed for quick and seamless adoption. Ultimately, the company that has an eye fixed on the data examines the bottom line periodically and adjusts its processes where necessary, can gain a competitive edge.
View Course. Lean Management.
0コメント