#Success stories lean six sigma how to

I've met and spoken with several people who either are Black Belts or worked in organizations that had several Black Belts. That discussion pointed out that the lack of attention to the concepts of 'guides' and 'enablers' causes concern since without this information an organization is missing about 80% of the data needed to make the necessary decisions related to project definition and problem identification. In 'SIPOC for Service - Is it Enough?' the discussion focused only on the SIPOC notation and not on any of the other aspects of Six Sigma. For example, many of the metrics and calculations that are so much a part of the Six Sigma method are not even captured or tracked in a somewhat similar service process. Concepts that make perfect sense in a manufacturing environment may not even exist in a service environment. As I pointed out in 'The Invisible Process' and 'Is It Cake or Is It Clean?' manufacturing and service processes are different and should be treated differently. The purpose of this column is to explore the method/framework/discipline/approach called 'Six Sigma' applied to Service Sector organizations and organizations primarily providing services, in contrast to organizations primarily providing products. There is nothing wrong with the concept of near-perfect products and services for customers. The question to answer is, 'Are they sufficient and appropriate for service organizations?' In fact, if combined with other concepts and approaches, there is nothing wrong with these activities. In organizations where any kind of structure for approaching process improvement is missing, these activities probably make a lot of sense.

Control the process to make sure defects don't recur.

Improve the process to remove causes of defects.

Analyze the data and discover causes of the problem.

Measure the defects and process operation.

Define the problem and what the customers require.DMAIC stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. These are summed up in the acronym DMAIC. The approach taken to do this is comprised of five phases (or steps or activities). In its purest form, Six Sigma is all about eliminating defects from a manufactured product.

In order to evaluate the usefulness and appropriateness of applying Six Sigma to the improvement of service processes, it's essential to understand some of the basic concepts of that discipline. Figure 1, the SIPOC Diagram, represents the basic concepts of the SIPOC notation. The purpose of this column is to explore the more detailed concepts surrounding Six Sigma and to determine whether it's a sufficient approach in the understanding and improvement of business processes in service organizations. This, of course, assumes that the process itself has been correctly defined. However, it can be somewhat useful as a 'high level' view of a process. The conclusion was that, as a singular modeling method, Six Sigma's SIPOC is not sufficient to understand all the aspects of a process in order to define, accurately analyze, and suggest improvements to processes. In an earlier column, the basic concepts of modeling in Six Sigma projects using a technique called SIPOC were discussed. These references are not meant to be an all-inclusive list but rather a representation of some of the material currently available for reference. Most of the comments in this column are based on information from, ,, , and. Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules Tabulation of Lists in RuleSpeak ®: A Primer - Using 'The Following' Clause

#Success stories lean six sigma how to

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