MRO Today - Six Sigma in no time

Six Sigma in no time

Are you ready for Six Sigma but don’t know where to start? This fast-break program will help you prioritize your projects and get them up and running quickly.

by S. "Mani" Manivannan

In some aspects of quality improvement, TQM and Six Sigma share the same philosophy of how to accomplish Total Quality. They both emphasize the importance of top-management support and leadership. Both approaches make it clear that continuous quality improvement is critical to long-term business success. So why has the popularity of TQM waned while Six Sigma’s popularity continued to grow in the past decade?

Unlike TQM, Six Sigma was not developed by technicians who only dabbled in management and who therefore produced only broad guidelines for management to follow. Six Sigma implementation was created by some of America’s most gifted CEOs; people like Motorola’s Bob Galvin, Allied Signal’s Larry Bossidy and GE’s Jack Welch. These people had a single goal in mind: making their businesses as successful as possible. Once they were convinced that Six Sigma tools and techniques could help them do this, they developed a framework to make it happen.
The differences between TQM and Six Sigma are summarized in the table below.

TQM vs. Six Sigma
TQM	Six Sigma
A functional specialty within the organization.	An infrastructure of dedicated change agents. Focuses on cross-functional value delivery streams rather than functional division of labor.
Focuses on quality.	Focuses on strategic goals and applies them to cost, schedule and other key business metrics.
Motivated by quality idealism.	Driven by tangible benefit for a major stockholder group (customers, shareholders, and employees).
Loosely monitors progress toward goals.	Ensures that the investment produces the expected return.
People are engaged in routine duties (planning, improvement, control)	“Slack” resources are created to change key business processes and the organization itself.
Emphasizes problem solving.	Emphasizes breakthrough rates of improvement.
Focuses on standard performance, e.g. ISO 9000.	Focuses on world class performance, e.g. 3.4 PPM error rate.
Quality is a permanent, full-time job. Career path is in the quality profession.	Six Sigma job is temporary. Six Sigma is a stepping-stone; career path leads elsewhere.
Provides a vast set of tools and techniques with no clear framework for using them effectively.	Provides a selected subset of tools and techniques and a clearly defined framework for using them to achieve results (DMAIC).
Goals are developed by quality department based on quality criteria and the assumption that what is good for quality is good for the organization.	Goals flow down from customers and senior leadership’s strategic objectives. Goals and metrics are reviewed at the enterprise level to assure that local sub-optimization does not occur.
Developed by technical personnel.	Developed by CEOs.
Focuses on long-term results. Expected payoff is not well-defined.	Six Sigma looks for a mix of short-term and long-term results, as dictated by business demands.

The current state of Six Sigma application
Many companies have attempted to implement Six Sigma only to realize disappointing results. What happened? The problem could be any one or combination of the following reasons:
1. Did you really need Six Sigma in your company or department? Maybe not.
2. Perhaps you choose the wrong person as your “Black Belt.”
3. Maybe someone at the top didn’t get behind the initiative.
4. Perhaps key team members didn’t understand Six Sigma, and therefore could not implement it effectively.
Enterprise-wide understanding of the Six Sigma process is required for company-wide buy-in, and ultimately, company-wide success. In general, projects are tied to business goals which can be found in the company’s Balanced Scorecard, annual business plans, P&Ls, production goals or other systems companies use to make sure their efforts are directed to critical areas.

Buy-in is the most difficult part; if we can’t get the process owners to implement these changes, what chance do we have of getting them to implement the “common sense” changes?

Six Sigma betters an organization at all levels. At the highest level, this involves moving the entire organization from 3 or 4 Sigma business processes to 6 Sigma processes. Rising from 3 Sigma to 6 Sigma requires reducing defects by a factor of more than 20,000, which requires a complete transformation of the organization’s culture. Such a transformation can’t be accomplished by simply “tweaking” processes; it requires creativity, and the greatest enemy of creativity is hierarchy.

Because hierarchy in a traditional company controls all resources — material and human — an individual employee must obtain permission from someone to use any resource. If the resources required to pursue a creative idea are controlled by several positions in the hierarchy, the employee must get permission from each. And when one asks permission, only a “yes” answer moves things ahead.

Six Sigma’s magic doesn’t lie in statistical or high-tech razzle-dazzle. Rather, Six Sigma relies on tried-and-true methods that have been around for decades. In fact, Six Sigma discards a great deal of the complexity that characterizes Total Quality Management (TQM). By one expert’s count, there are more than 400 TQM tools and techniques. Six Sigma takes a handful of these methods and trains a small cadre of in-house technical leaders, known as Six Sigma Black Belts/Green Belts to a high level of proficiency in the application of these techniques. To be sure, some of the methods used by Black Belts/Green Belts, including up-to-date computer technology, are highly advanced. But the tools are applied within a simple performance-improvement framework known as “DMAIC,” or Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control, which is analogous to the older TQM model of “Plan-Do-Study-Act.”

Anyone with more than the most cursory exposure to Six Sigma is familiar with the DMAIC cycle.

DMAIC is almost universally used to guide Six Sigma process improvement projects. Although truly dramatic improvement in quality requires transforming the management philosophy and organization culture, the fact is that projects must be undertaken sooner or later to make things happen. Projects are the means through which processes are systematically changed; they are the bridge between the planning and the doing. However, DMAIC is not a method of planning projects. Project planning is a subject in its own right. Although projects and plans are closely related, they also differ in many respects.

The key drivers of Six Sigma success

• Winning executive support for Six Sigma initiatives
• Linking Six Sigma with succession planning
• Defining critical objectives for the Six Sigma program
• Demonstrating the impact (value) of quality initiatives on and for customers

Six Sigma’s impressive bottom-line results normally flow from Six Sigma projects.

Properly defined Six Sigma projects meet certain criteria:
1. They have clearly defined deliverables.
2. They are approved by management.
3. They are not so large that they’re unmanageable nor so small that they’re unimportant or uninteresting.
4. They relate directly to the organization’s mission.

According to a recent benchmarking report, successful Six Sigma initiatives share three common characteristics:
1. Implementation teams led by senior executives,
2. Well-organized training programs, and 3. The ability to create a corporate culture that values objective performance measurement.
Organizations that try to implement Six Sigma initiatives without addressing these three areas are hobbling themselves at the starting gate. Leadership, execution and culture determine the ultimate success or failure of Six Sigma programs.
The attached pdf file worksheet is a good basic template for identifying and executing a Six Sigma project. Good luck!

Part 2:
The DMAIC path