Tag Archives: Six Sigma

Requirements vs Delighters

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Requirements are those service or product characteristics that the customer requires in order to satisfy their needs. When the business fails to meet these requirements, the customer will not be satisfied. The result is a lost business opportunity. The analysis of these requirements will eventually lead us to customer critical to quality (CTQ) issues.

On the other hand, delighters are those aspects of a product or service that delight the customer when present, but are not required. For example, hotel customers did not expect a free continental breakfast in the past. By providing customers with this service, some hotel chains were able to gain a competitive advantage.

This practice leads to customer expectation. Once exposed to a delighter, the customer can, and usually does, come to require these delighters. In other words, the delighter becomes a requirement. In addition, as is typical with customer satisfaction issues, requirements tend to escalate. For example, where customers were once delighted with a free continental breakfast selection of donuts, juice and coffee, some are now expecting prepared foods.

Finally, customer requirements tend to increase in number and complexity. Once a requirement gets set in a customer’s mind, they do not typically to go away. For this reason, businesses need to plan the rollout of delighters and measure their impact. There is no rest for the business that wishes to gain and keep market share.

Six Sigma and Business Metrics

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Building on the basics of Six Sigma, there must first be a linkage between the problem being addressed and key business issues or metrics.  This would include such parameters as the cost of operation, profits, market share, etc. This linkage helps to ensure that the Six Sigma project will have the management support and resources needed for success. 

What if the business’s focus is not on the customer?  Would improving these metrics improve customer satisfaction? The answer is maybe. The business might, by chance, hit on things that improve customer satisfaction. The most probable result, though, is that the business will get better at doing things that the customer does not consider important. This would make the Six Sigma effort “non-value-added” in the eyes of the customer. This has been the fate of many quality improvement programs.

Six Sigma and the Truth

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The truth is the basis of any effort to improve processes and eliminate defects.  Six Sigma depends upon the truth to succeed. Sacred cows, sub-optimization, and parochialism are enemies of the truth and place limits upon how much improvement is achievable.  To optimize improvement, we must embrace the truth, even if it hurts.  The truth will literally set us free.

Six Sigma Statistics

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Six Sigma process improvement strategies use two applications of statistics.  These are descriptive and inferential statistics.  Descriptive statistics describe the basic characteristics of a data set. It uses the data’s mean, median, mode, and standard deviation to create a picture of the behavior of the data.

 Inferential statistics uses descriptive statistics to infer qualities on a population, based on a sample from that population.  This involves making predictions. Examples of this are voter exit poling, sporting odds, and predicting customer behavior.

 Statistics are an important part of Six Sigma process improvement.  Even so, statistical calculations do not solve problems.  Business acumen and non-statistical tools are partners with statistical calculations in establishing root causes and in developing solutions.  As important as some sources tend to make statistical tools, Six Sigma improvement projects rarely fail because of math problems.  Instead, they fail due to a lack of honesty, management support, or a lack of business acumen.  The best screwdriver in the world will still make a poor pry bar.

Six Sigma Process Improvement

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Process improvement is the act of increasing the value of a process’s output in the eyes of its customers. 

 Putting this into a business perspective, we can view a business as a collection of processes that focus upon providing an output that its customer’s are willing to pay for. Therefore, the objective of a business process is to add value to a collection of inputs, from a customer perspective, to produce a profit to the business.  Consider the following, simplified, value equation.

 Profit = Perceived Value – Inherent Value

 Perceived value is customer and competitor driven.  From the customer standpoint, this involves their perception of cost, function, ease of use, absence of defects, customer service, etc.  The customer’s view of your competition, in these same categories, provides the competitor influence. 

 Inherent value comes from the cost of raw materials, infrastructure, and process. This adds up to the actual cost of production of a product, or the actual cost of provision of a service.  Businesses wish to increase the perceived value of their products and services. While at the same time, they wish to decrease their inherent costs.  The result is increased customer satisfaction and higher profits.  Process improvement becomes the vehicle to accomplish both.

Lean and Mean Process Improvement Review

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McIntyre harnesses 15 years of experience in process improvement to produce this specialized book designed to help members of an office analyze and improve their performance and articulate their processes to senior management.

This book explains, in detail, the aspects of the Six Sigma process-improvement methodology. McIntyre focuses on the five phases of this methodology, including defining the problem process at hand, gathering data that accurately represents the process in question, analyzing that data to determine any defects, improving the process based on that data and making sure that gains from changing the process are maintained. He approaches each phase independently, giving a detailed overview of what someone looking to improve a process might do as they progress through all of them. The end product of the journey should be an improved process that helps customers get the results they’re looking for and, therefore, helps business grow. McIntyre intends for this book to be useful to “ground floor” workers—those in cubicles and offices actually living out the processes in question. However, the book alone will not be enough to explain his methods to those who do not already have a background in business or process management. While the author’s content is adequate, helping people at this level understand and implement it might be a problem, particularly when they are specialists in other fields. McIntyre tries to define his terms and make his specialized material as accessible as possible….. the information presented here could help a lot of companies solve problems and grow.

Has much to offer those trying to improve their business, if specialized knowledge and terminology are already in place.

The Application of Six Sigma

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The use of Six Sigma is not just a factory or corporate strategy.  Six Sigma can be taught  at the cubicle and office level also.  Remember that Six Sigma is not a program or just a tool box.  It is instead a shift in the way we view ourselves and our work. 

There are differences, of course, in how you teach Six Sigma to an individual as opposed to a group.  That is my speciality.  Maybe it isn’t really Six Sigma, as I hae been told, but it works.  That is more important than a name.

Six Sigma Projects

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  Below are some examples of potential projects. Some are good process improvement project ideas and some are not.

 1.        The installation of a new process or piece equipment that has already been selected.

 Answer: This is not a good project idea.  The decision about what to do has already been made.

 2.        Call center cycle time improvement.

 Answer: This is a good project idea. It involves the improvement of an existing process.  It may need further scope narrowing (Type of phone calls, for example).

 3.        Development of a new ad campaign.

 Answer: This is not a good project idea.  The scope is too broad and does not address improving an existing process. Even so, some of the tools that make up common process improvement methodologies can be used in the development of the new ad campaign.

 4.        Improve safety.

 Answer: This can be a good project idea.  The scope is too broad and needs to be narrowed.  If the scope were narrowed to something more specific, it would become a good project (reduce back injuries in the warehouse, for example).

 5.        Reduce the number of back injuries while unloading trucks.

 Answer: This is a good project idea.  The project is narrowed down to a specific situation involving back injuries.

 6.        Increase profits

 Answer: Not a good project idea.  The scope is too broad.

Six Sigma Success

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The roll out of a process improvement initiative like Six Sigma is always a cultural event.  It requires a cultural change.  The problem is that many executives do not have a clear understanding of how to change a culture in this way.  Not because they do not have leadership skills, but because it requires leadership without the use of position power. It is sales related.

Six Sigma process improvement initiatives that are inflected on an organization inevitably fail.  An organization must be led through the cultural change. If the individuals on the front line (sales, operations, repair, janitors, etc) don’t buy in, the culture will not change.  To them it will become the “Program of the Week.”  Unfortunately, many consulting firms do not focus on this important aspect of Six Sigma cultural change.  It is senior management that writes the checks and as a result it is senior management that becomes the focus.

Do yourself a favor.  Do not focus on a prescribed number of Six Sigma Black Belts and Green Belts.  Do not focus on the number of full time Six Sigma employees. Neither of these criteria are determinant of success.  They are the sales leverage of the consultant that is more concerned with their fees, or they are not knowledgeable enough to be handing your Six Sigma roll out.  Instead, try a single department roll out.  Let their success create excitement with others in the organization. Cultural change starts with the “grass roots” of the organization. If you agree with this statement, than this will become your area of focus in Six Sigma. Senior Management buy in is essential, but different from the buy in of the rest of the organization.

The Six Sigma DMAIC Process

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The Six Sigma process improvement methodology has 5 steps. Corporately, they are called the DMAIC (da*may*ic) process. The steps, also called phases, are Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. A process improvement team moves through these phases by meeting specific objectives (Tollgates or milestones).  In reality, the team’s progress through the methodology is cyclic in nature.  A Six Sigma project may need to go through one or more of the steps repeatedly in an effort to get to the root cause of a problem and eliminate it. 

In addition, as the Six Sigma  team moves through the steps, they identify other defect causing issues for future teams.  A single improvement project may identify multiple opportunities outside of the team’s project scope. The rigor of a good process improvement effort mandates that the team stay on course and simply flag these issues along the way, rather than bouncing from one problem to another. Other teams can address these new opportunities. The net result is a business that has less waste, lower cost, higher customer satisfaction, increased market share, and as a result, increased profits.