Six Sigma Techniques
Six Sigma, the project management technique developed by American cell phone giant Motorola was so effective that it helped the quality of the product to improve a lot. It started off quite rough but went to become more and more refined with time. The processes turned very effective in businesses, and they loved the difference in the system in the job procurement procedure. These principles and methods have the ability to change the fate of the company by making their work process more efficient. It helps in figuring out the performance of a different person in a project environment. This also helps in checking the effectiveness of a project and its processes.
It is completely a great tool and is driven by data in order to arrive at conclusions of the project. Very statistical methodology is used in improving it. It helps in diminishing the errors during the runtime of the project. Sigma is a Greek symbol and it basically exists to express the statistical term which measures the deviation between the mean and the target. If any process has three high Sigma reports and three below the line when checked for the Six Sigma, the defect rate is considered to be ‘extremely low’. The values have a higher spread if the limits are crossed.
No matter how complicated the project in hand is, Six Sigma can make it simple as it basically simplifies the goal of the project to achieving near perfection in the product, delivering the promises made and guaranteeing a certain level of customer satisfaction.
There are two prolonged processes that help in achieving these goals. They are:
- Problem Identification: This involves raising important questions about the processes like ‘what are the functions of this particular process?’, ‘Is it working the way it should word?’, ‘what is necessary to run this particular process smoothly?’ and ‘What should be the ideal way of this process working?’ Then comes the second question i.e. determining if the process is worth making corrections or not.
- Problem solving: This involves finding answers to the questions asked in the ‘project identification phase’ in order to implement the necessary changes to foster the achievement of goals which were set by the process.
The Three unforgettable principles of Six Sigma are:
- Customer is the primary target: Customers are God and should not lose faith in you. The aim is to make God happy. How to do that? By providing them him/her with maximum benefits. This would help you earn their trust and loyalty that would prove worthy in the market when the next product is launched. This would sky-rocket the sales and makes your product the ruler of the market.
- Self-introspection into processes: Analyze all the steps involved in a process thoroughly in order to find out the regions of wastage. Pin-point those areas by proper analysis of data and form a data collection system which achieves goals like accurate measurements and normalization is data collection mechanism. Deeming the data worthy or unworthy of helping you improve the process is another great factor.
- Elimination of errors: Upon identification of the problems, it’s now time to act as fast as possible and eliminate them so that it doesn’t affect the process adversely.
Six Sigma Techniques to dwell upon:
- Brainstorming: Brainstorming is very important is resolving conflicts in processes as it involves finding out solutions by extensive thinking, asking for suggestions and holding group discussions to take ideas to ‘improve’ the processes.
- Root cause analysis or The 5 WHYs: This comes under the analysis phase in which the systems and their working mechanisms are asked important questions in order to find the root of errors.
- VOC (Voice of Customers): It is a very important piece of document. It contains the market feedback of potential customers regarding newly launched products. This aims at improving the product according to the response by the customers.
- The 5S System: This is a technique that originated under Japanese work ethics culture. It is another effective waste management technique. The 5 S are ‘Seiri(Sort), Seiton (Set in Order), Seiso (Shine), Seiketsu (Standardize) and Shitsuke (sustain).
- Kaizen (the process of never-ending improvement): This strategy is one of the most powerful business strategies in the world and aims at improving the business in a continuous loop by reducing waste through proper monitoring and actions.
- Benchmarking: This is a very interesting technique of standardizing the measurement standards by comparing the progress and situation to that of the competitors’.
Poka-yoke (Mistake Proofing): This is yet another Japanese originated phrase which means ‘to avoid errors’. Here human and manufacturing errors are eliminated as well as human resources deemed ineligible are also removed.
inging