Six Sigma is a powerful methodology that can be used to improve business processes. It is a structured approach to problem solving that can be applied to any process - manufacturing, sales, marketing, IT, BPO, accounting, purchasing, you name it. All processes have variation. However, if you have not measured level of variation in the processes, you will never ever come to know the impact that it have been causing to the business. Its not wrong saying that Variation in the standard process is a the cause of all evil - it leads to defects and customer dissatisfaction. Six Sigma methodology can be used to reduce variation from any source and thus improve costs, quality, and hence customer satisfaction.
Six Sigma is a data driven methology which provides you the results in the form of:
- Business Process Improvement
- only 3.4 defects per million of opportunities
- Customer Orientation
- Quantifiable finiancial improvements.
All these cannot be achieved if the processes are not well defined, structured. The standard methodology of Six Sigma which is widely implemented by lots of organization is DMAIC. DMAIC is used to improve existing processes and it stands for Define - Measure - Analyze - Improve - Control. If you think about it - this methodology is nothing but a common sense.
Before we start working on a problem, we need to have a good definition of what is the problem, why we are working on it, where is the pain area, what is in scope of the project etc. All of these are accomplished in the Define phase. Secondly, in the Measure phase, we are interested in ensuring that the data used for further analysis is free of measurement errors.
Six Sigma is about making decisions based on facts & data. If the data is inaccurate, we would end up making the wrong decisions.
Hence, the measure phase ensures good data. Before making any improvements, it is also important to establish a baseline so that we can clearly communicate the benefits obtained from our project to other key stakeholders.
The next phase, Analyze, is all about making hypothesis and using data to either prove or disprove our hypothesis. We make hypothesis about what is causing the problem and then establish the real root causes.
The fourth phase, Improve, focuses on getting the best possible solution to solve the root cause of the problem. The solution is optimized and any potential failure modes are resolved before the solution is deployed in the real world.
The last phase, Control, is all about ensuring that the solution is sustainable in the long run. Any financial benefits obtained from the project are also quantified.
Finally, the improved process is transitioned over to the process owner. As we can see from this paragraph, any problem can be addressed using this structured approach.
Six Sigma methodology does not restricts to any organziation, firm, business matters. It can be well implemented in an individual dat to day activities as well. Even from waking up in the morning to your drive to office... Six sigma analysis can assist you whenever you want and would make your life my simplier and easy that you would have never thought off!!!
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