The paper focuses on the phenomenon of Six Sigma and how it helps companies attain IT oriented solutions. The paper starts off by describing the chosen company – Wipro Technologies – and how the use and provision of Six Sigma has helped it develop and prosper. The paper details the influence of Six Sigma thereof.
Wipro Technologies and Six Sigma
Wipro Technologies is a successful global services provider that primarily delivers the technology and relative mechanism to those companies that are IT-oriented and use IT as the primary mode for satisfying their clientele. Wipro has 40 'Centres of Excellence' that induce solutions around specified requirements of the producers and manufacturers. Wipro provides unmatched business value to clients through a mix of development excellence, quality structures and repair delivery innovation. Wipro may be the World's first CMMi Level 5 licensed software organization and also the first outdoors American company that was able to get the IEEE Software Process Award for its performance and services (Sharma et al., 2008).
Wipro has probably the most advanced and intricate Six Sigma structures in the market making certain that 91% from the projects are finished in a timely manner, which is a much higher percentage than the approximate completion rates of the industry which is at 55%. Six Sigma offers the tools for continuous step up from existing processes therefore helping maintain the SEI-CMM Level 5 and CMMi certifications (Sharma et al., 2008).
This situation concentrates on the steps applied by Wipro Technologies to employ the Six Sigma Quality mechanism to attain sustained proper business performances. It studies the implementation process at Wipro Technologies and also the benefits gained by the organization due to implementing Six Sigma (Sharma et al., 2008).
The situation also throws light around the recent developments within the Six Sigma theory inclusive of Wipro's Six Sigma Skill base and consulting knowledge and describes how the organization expects to construct its experience and expertise - to create continuous process improvement towards the organization (Sharma et al., 2008).
Backdrop
Wipro Limited was formed in the year 1945 and commenced its procedures in 1946 initially as vegetable oil organization. In early eighties, Wipro varied its services and expanded in to the IT sector with the expansion and freedom of expansion that India was experiencing within the eighties. This is a fascinating transformation from the vegetable oil company right into a global IT services titan (Sharma et al., 2008).
As it stands now, Wipro Technologies has turned into a global company providing technology oriented business solutions that satisfy the proper objectives of clients. Wipro has 40 'Centers of Excellence' that induce solutions associated with specific needs of Industries. Wipro can feature the provision of unmatched business value to clients through a mix of process excellence quality frameworks and repair delivery innovation (Sharma et al., 2008).
A powerful emphasis upon creating a professional work atmosphere, leaders from inside, and getting a worldwide outlook for business and growth have brought the company towards innovation of individual processes on the ongoing basis. Through the years, Wipro has considerably increased its competency oriented people procedures and shown innovative practices in talent acquirement, operation, and growth, according to proper needs (Sharma et al., 2008).
A number one provider of communication systems in the United States needed improvement within the product performance of the telecom application using Six Sigma methods. Thus, using the growing importance on aiming business procedures with customer needs and driving continuous improvement, Wipro started moving towards concentrating on Quality, therefore, developing a learning atmosphere that brought forward the implementation of Six Sigma (Sharma et al., 2008).
What's Six Sigma?
The term is really a record term that measures the extent of deviation in a procedure from the degree of perfection. Six Sigma is known as following the procedure that has six standard diversions on both sides from the specs window. It's a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for getting rid of defects (Keller, 2001). The central idea behind Six Sigma is when you are able to measure the number of "defects" you have inside a process, you are able to methodically learn how to get rid of them and obtain as near to "zero defects" as you possibly can ()Adams, et al., 2003.
Six Sigma begins with the use of record techniques for converting information from clients into specifications for items or services being developed or created. Six Sigma may be the business plan that makes one work smarter as opposed to harder (De Feo et al., 2005). One sigma provides a precision result of 68.27% while two sigma provides a precision result of 95.45% and three sigma provides a precision result of 99.73% - compared to all of these Six Sigma provides a precision result of 99.9997% Although 99.73% sounds excellent, it gradually dawned on firms that there's a significant distinction between 99.73% and 99.9997%. To explain this, for each million articles of mail (Pande, et al., 2001), the main difference is between 66,738 lost products and 3.4 lost products (see Exhibit 1 taken from Sharma et al., 2008).
To attain Six Sigma Quality, a procedure must produce about 3.4 defects for every million possibilities. A chance is understood to be a way for nonconformance, or otherwise meeting the needed specifications. What this means is one should be nearly perfect in performing key processes. The procedure and culture is conditioned for zero defects instead of being one which accepts that it's inevitable and acceptable, that mistakes will surface. Thus Six Sigma provides substantial cost cutbacks, enhanced efficiencies, sustainable enhancements and elevated stakeholder value (Pyzdek et al., 2009).
Evolution of Six Sigma at Wipro
Wipro may be the first Indian company to consider Six Sigma. Today, Wipro has probably the most mature, advanced and intricate Six Sigma programs in the market making certain that 91% from the projects are completed on schedule. Because the managers at Six Sigma are basically the pieoneers of this technology in India, Wipro has put around 10 years of solid experience into process quality and enhancement through the use of Six Sigma. The Six Sigma program propagates across the verticals and influences numerous areas for example project management software, market development and resource utilization (Express, 2002).
Six Sigma at Wipro only denotes a stride of quality that aims for near perfection. It's an umbrella program that encompasses every business model and division to ensure that it might transform itself into a first class company. At Wipro, this means:
(i) Have items and services live up to the global standards
(ii) Make sure that there are robust procedures implemented inside the organization
(iii) Constantly live up to and surpass customer anticipation
(iv) Make Quality part of the organizational culture (Sharma et al., 2008).
Difficulties experienced by Wipro and gaining knowledge from them:
Build the Culture:
Implementation of Six Sigma needed support from the greater level managers. It meant restructuring from the organization to supply the infrastructure, training and also the necessary confidence along the way. Wipro needed to build this culture which invested some time in implementation (Schroeder, 2006).
Project selection:
The very first year of deployment was very hard for Six Sigma success. They made the decision to choose the project based on high possibility of their success and specific to accomplish these questions. These projects were worked upon as pilot projects having a focus to understand. For picking the best project the area data was collected, process map was created and the significance of the project was judged in the eyes of clients (Schroeder, 2006).
Training:
Following the setup, the initial step of implementation ended up being to create and employ a team of execs and train them for a number of stages of Six Sigma. Working out was spread across five phases: Determining, calculating, examining, enhancing and manipulating the process and finally growing client satisfaction. These phases comprised of statistics, bench marking and style of experiments. To obtain the right type of people and training them would be a difficult task. This motivated Wipro to begin their very own operation as a consultant to coach the folks (Snee et al., 2002).
Assets:
It had been hard to identify assets that were needed for short-term basis and long-term basis because it was different from one project to the next. Wipro made it happen based on importance and need for the project (Sharma et al., 2008).
Project Reviews:
As timely reviews play a really critical part to evaluate the prosperity of a task. Wipro needed to create a team of experts for this function. The job designation ended up including aspects like timeliness, discovering the gaps, weak areas and to determine the outcome according to the program (Sharma et al., 2008).
Implementation of Six Sigma at Wipro
Wipro has adopted the project method for Six Sigma, where projects are recognized based on the issue areas under each one of the critical Business Processes that negatively impacts the company considerably (Tennant, 2001). Wipro has developed following Six Sigma methods (see Exhibit 2):
(I) For developing new processes:
a. DSSS Methodology -Wipro utilizes DSSS methodology for software structuring. The methodology employs vigorous preocedural metrics and cause assessments through the software development lifecycle for defect free shipping minimizing customer price of database integration.
b. DSSP Methodology - employed for creating new processes and items
c. DCAM Methodology - employed for creating for client satisfaction and productivity
(II) For Enhancing Existing Processes
a. TQSS Methodology -employed for defect decrease in Transactional procedures.
b. DMAIC Methodology -employed for process enhancements in Non-transactional procedures
(III) For Reengineering
a. CFPM Methodology - employed for mix functional Process mapping (Sharma et al., 2008).
The email list of gamers at Wipro includes:
Executive Management
Six Sigma Champions and Deployment Leaders
Financial Professionals
Black Devices
Eco-friendly Devices
Yellow Devices
Six Sigma ventures at Wipro include (see Exhibit 3):
(i) Driven by business heads, also known as Champions for that projects.
(ii) Brought by Eco-friendly Devices (GB)
(iii) Aided by Black Devices (BB)
The Control over the project at Wipro follows the next tools for implementation of Six Sigma:
Ideation
Definition
Selection
Monitoring
Confirming
Presently 15000 workers are been trained in Six Sigma methods. Wipro has additionally developed a Six Sigma skill base well over 180 licensed black devices while assisting to unveil on the 1000 projects. (see Exhibit 4) (Sharma et al., 2008).
Six Sigma Working as a consultant at Wipro:
Wipro's Six Sigma consulting experience has peaked using the indigenous growth and development of new methods that it requires for the clients. As Wipro gorws to encompass the Six Sigma consulting journey, it develops its experience and expertise- to supply enterprise-class spectrum of subjects running a business process administration and knowledge technology systems integration. The main focus is on following the project requirements and ensuring that these are integrated along with other techniques to aid process needs. Presently you will find over 200 PMI licensed consultants at Wipro (Wipro, 2002-6).
The Wipro quality consulting group trains in experiencing this precision of Six Sigma with Wipro's own methods, training abilities and global experience. Wipro will help with institutionalizing Six Sigma over the organization for transformation.
Wipro provides consulting in institutionalizing a business wide Six Sigma program that is an expert in applying structures across various IT enhancement, growth, manufacturing and support as well as integral business procedures.
Wipro provides the following Six Sigma consulting services (see Exhibit 5):
• Six Sigma institutionalization
• Problem fixing using six Sigma
• Six Sigma training (Sharma et al., 2008)
Enjoying the advantages:
The profit that Wipro has accomplished by utilizing Six Sigma continues to be among the high points (see Exhibit 6).
Because the Six Sigma initiative began ageing Wipro recognized two major phenomena in its decline:
• The greatest projects had all been finished
• The Yellow-belt culture had healed little issues before they grew to become large ones.
At this time, the project-based Six Sigma culture started to provide methods to the sustenance of cultures (Wirpro, 2002-6).
The Six Sigma process led to an achievement of near to 250%, 6 minutes for 1 Megabytes transfer and 18 minutes for average bandwith. The standard aim here was 200%. Because the performance is primarily client based, the goal of Six Sigma Implementation at Wipro has continuously been in integrating and applying approaches via a synchronised concentration on decreasing defects, timeliness, and productivity. It has also been modified to include the reduction of maintenance costs, schedule-overrun expenses as well as the development expenses for clients. Dimensions and progress indications happen to be oriented towards exactly what the clients believe to be significant and worthy of purchase (Sharma et al., 2008). Towards this particular aspect, Six Sigma concepts have performed a huge role in:
Enhancing performance via a precise quantitative knowledge of the customer's needs therefore getting in customer focus
Enhancing the effectiveness in upstream processes from the software development existence cycle by decreasing the overall defects (these were recorded to be at a total of 50%) and cycle time reduction (this recorded a decrease to 5% from the previous average of 12%).
Waste elimination and elevated productivity as much as 35%.
Price of failure avoidance (installation failures lowered from 4.5% to at least 1% in hardware business).
Tangible financial savings because of lower database integration cost for customer (Sharma et al., 2008).
Experts pointed out that Six Sigma was an indisputable success at Wipro irrespective of focusing on client satisfaction, enhancement in internal performance, or perhaps in the advance of shareowner value.
The outcomes of achieving Six Sigma are speedy and all-encompasisng at the Wipro procedures. Its methodology provides Six Sigma understanding and abilities towards the client, enabling the customer to produce possession, generate assessments and conclusion as well as maintain success. The advancement of Wipro's quality procedures takes the advantages one step further, making certain the clients take advantage of:
30-40% lower total price of possession
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