Six Sigma principles and applications

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Critical Success Factors of Six Sigma in the Enterprise

The growth of Six Sigma as a TQM strategy is based on its ability to quantify or measure customers' requirements so they can be used in planning manufacturing processes to fulfill demand. Of the many change models that comprise TQM as a field of study, Six Sigma is the most customer-centric in that it seeks to measure or quantify customers' expectations before any process or change management is initiated. Lean thinking, TQM, Theory of Constraints, Agile Manufacturing, and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) are all change models that rely more on re-routing and re-engineering processes vs. making sure customers' needs are met. As a result, the role of Six Sigma in companies who use it is to ensure a precise level of alignment between a company's direction on the one hand and the needs of customers on the other (Pande, Peter S., Neuman, Robert P. And Cavanagh, Roland R., 2000). By using customer requirements as the basis for defining how products will be produced, one of the major goals of Six Sigma is achieved, which is the minimizing of variation of each unit of a product produced. Think of Six Sigma as a technique for minimizing the amount of variation in products produced by using the customers' needs as the "roadmap" or baseline of minimum performance required of a manufacturer. As a result, the strategic objective of Six Sigma is to have virtually defect-free production, where a defect is defined any instance or event in which the product fails to meet a customer requirement (Pande, Peter S., Neuman, Robert P. And Cavanagh, Roland R. 2000).

Six Sigma's defining features include a series of structured practices, methodologies, frameworks and tools for reducing the sources of variation in process performance related to attracting, sell, and serving customers. Taken together, these factors all are relied on for minimizing the amount of variation in a process that has been anchored by customer requirements to begin with. This aspect of quantifying the needs of customers and making them the foundation for variance analysis also has been attributed with turning entire corporations around. In 1995 for example, Jack Welch called Six Sigma the most important initiative GE had ever undertaken. Motorola credited Six Sigma with turning around the struggling electronics manufacturer in the face of growing Japanese competition in the 1980s (Jeroen de Mast, 2007). The pervasive use of Six Sigma throughout manufacturing can also be attributed to the its pervasive use as a problem solving roadmap which has wide applicability across many different business functions according to Pestorius (2007). For Six Sigma to have a revolutionary impact in a company there needs to be a change in a company's culture and values as well (Pestorius 2007) and (Davison and Al-Shaghana 2007). One of the most difficult cultural changes many companies confront when they use Six Sigma techniques is staying focused on customer requirements vs. just producing products as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

Of all TQM approaches mentioned in this paper, Six Sigma requires that organization adopt a customer-based culture that strives to continually align to customers' needs. While the topic of organizational barriers to change is outside the scope of this paper, it is clear that overcoming resistance to change is one of the biggest impediments to getting Six Sigma projects started in organizations. Six Sigma also requires organizations to concentrate on reducing all sources of variation in producing products. By reducing variation so that each unit of a product matches customers' expectations, a higher level customer satisfaction is inevitably earned. To minimize variation in a products' manufacturing quality, it also requires that companies have a strong level of teamwork across the organization as well. In short, Six Sigma, in looking to minimize the variations between customer requirements and the processes used to meet them via production, creates a collaborative process workflow to attain higher levels of process quality over time. The majority of Six Sigma projects are primarily internal, enterprise-wide processes including marketing, sales, service, production, product development, and logistics (Raisinghani, Ette, Pierce, Cannon, Daripaly, 2005).

Six Sigma's success is attributed to defining strategies for improving the quality level of products while also making sure their specific characteristics precisely align with the needs of customers. The name of this technique itself, Six Sigma, speaks to the Greek letter that is used in statistics to denote variance, which is the Sigma (?).