This decade’s most famous buzzword is “digital transformation.” New technologies and tools support the transformation journey of big and small companies as they compete to get a huge slice of business in a fast-paced competitive environment. Is it, however, sufficient to smooth a company’s transformational process? Although digital transformation accelerates its growth, it requires quality control and business transformation management. To amplify your carrier, Six Sigma awareness certification introduces the key concepts and benefits of lean six sigma, including a brief introduction to the importance of the ‘soft skills needed for successful projects and change. So, this blog on what is Six Sigma awareness? is geared to anyone who wants to enhance their business skills, operate more efficiently, or advance their career.
Let us discuss the first topic: what six sigma awareness is?
What is Six Sigma Awareness?
Six Sigma awareness is an introduction to six sigma and is especially targeted at professionals who are new to six Sigma or need an overview of six sigma. Six Sigma targets to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects in manufacturing and business processes using a set of quality management methods. It also covers the six sigma principles and concepts, six sigma roles and responsibilities, benefits and applications of six sigma, along with an overview of the six sigma toolkits and DMAIC methodology.
Six Sigma awareness helps participants identify lean six sigma projects and become valuable resources to a process improvement team. It highlights how understanding lean six sigma can enhance the participant’s skill set, augment a resume, or create a potential career path. It also provides a comprehensive understanding and skill development in important LSS practices relevant to employees who participate in improvement processes.
As we have seen, an overview of “what is six sigma awareness?” We will now discuss the need for lean six sigma.
The Need for Lean Six Sigma
Lean Six Sigma speeds up the potential for organizations to achieve their missions and strategic goals. Incorporating the best continuous improvement technique available builds the appropriate culture, the best mindsets, and the excellent infrastructure for you to serve your customers better and earn their loyalty. In addition, it’s an excellent path to satisfying customers profitably. Following are some of the needs for lean six sigma:
1. Increases Customer Satisfaction
Since the lean six sigma methodology involves a strong focus on customer needs and requirements and delivers high value to customers, one of the benefits of using these techniques is increased customer satisfaction. In addition, lean six sigma focuses on product improvements, delivery methods, and other customer service activities that can affect customer satisfaction. Ultimately, an increase in customer satisfaction will lead to repeat business, positive word-of-mouth, and, with successful implementation, increased sales and overall business success.
2. Reduces Costs
One of the key benefits of lean six sigma activities for businesses is the reduction of expenses associated with process improvements that demand less time and the reduction of defects or errors that might result in rework. Companies that use lean six sigma methodologies can significantly reduce costs while maintaining or even increasing customer value by examining the different steps involved in a process, understanding customer requirements, and then eliminating irrelevant steps while increasing value.
3. Improves Efficiency
Creating standard processes that are simple to learn, operate and enhance means your business grows faster. Likewise, reclaiming resources and revenue from newly streamlined processes means more available resources to grow your business.
4. Helps in Strategic Planning
Six Sigma can play a vital role in any strategic vision. Once your business has created a mission statement and carried out a SWOT analysis, six sigma can assist you in focusing on areas for improvement. For instance, if your business technique is based on being a cost leader in the market, then six sigma can improve internal processes, increase yields, eliminate unnecessary complexity and gain or maintain the lowest cost supplier agreements. Whatever your technique turns out to be, six sigma can assist make your company the best at what it does.
5. Increases Employee Involvement
One of the huge advantages of lean six sigma is increased in employee involvement through their participation in process improvement teams designed to help them improve processes and increase value for their customers, internal and external. By involving employees in implementing these programs, they gain a greater appreciation for the impact of their work on bottom-line business results and an appreciation for how the work of other employees and departments also contributes to success.
6. Better Time Management
Enterprises implementing the lean six sigma methodology will help their employees manage their time appropriately, which brings out efficient business and employees who are more productive than ever before. Employees are asked to set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused, and time-bound) goals, and the data principles of six sigma can be applied to those goals. In addition, there are three key areas where learning, performance, and fulfillment can be implemented.
Now we will see the different approaches to process improvement.
Different Approaches to Process Improvement
If businesses decided to stay the same over time consistently, many of them would collapse. However, innovation requires change, and if businesses don’t change to meet customer needs, they won’t achieve much growth. Therefore, many organizations use process improvement methodology to adapt their processes to customer demands. Certainly, Business process improvements are approaches in which a team evaluates their latest processes and adapts them with the expectation to increase productivity, streamline workflows, adapt to changing business needs, or increase profitability.
Process improvement is analyzing, identifying, and improving processes within a business to enhance overall quality. It affects the organization’s overall quality and influences long-term growth and change. Following are the approaches to process improvement:
1. Six Sigma Methodology
Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology that targets to minimize the number of variations within the end product. Bill Smith, an American engineer and Motorola employee created it in 1986. This method employs statistical data as a standard to assist corporate leaders in comprehending how their operations operate. A process is considered optimized if it yields less than 3.4 defects per one million cycles. Six Sigma is frequently used in manufacturing, mainly because it assists in minimizing defects and inconsistencies. In conclusion, the aim here is to optimize for consistency, which leads to customer satisfaction.
Six Sigma uses two main processes. DMAIC stands for define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. It is a statistically driven methodology used to improve, optimize, and stabilize business processes. DMADV stands for define, measure, analyze, design, and verify. This approach utilizes six sigma when existing processes do not fulfill customer requirements, even after advancement, or when the implementation of new techniques is essential.
2. Total Quality Management (TQM)
Total quality management (TQM) is a customer-focused approach that involves continuous improvement over time. This method is often used in supply chain management and customer satisfaction projects. TQM depends heavily on data-driven decisions and performance metrics. During the problem-solving process, you use success metrics to decide how to improve a process. Companies will use TQM diagrams to troubleshoot quality issues. Following are some of the key features of TQM:
- Customer-focus: TQM’s ultimate purpose is to serve the end customer. If your team is focused on increasing quality, consider how a change in the process can affect how end-users perceive your product
- Full-team involvement: TQM engages the entire team, not just production, unlike other process improvement approaches. As a result, you might find yourself looking for methods to improve business-centric processes like sales and marketing to benefit the end-user.
- Continuous improvement: Continuous business improvement is the idea of making small changes to optimize processes continually. There’s a lot of variability in business, and continuous improvement helps your team adapt when outside circumstances change
- Data-driven decision making: To apply continuous process improvement, you must continually collect data to analyze how processes are performing. Therefore, this data can help recognize where there may be inefficiencies and where to focus improvement initiatives
The main objective of implementing TQM is to improve processes. Other process improvement techniques like six sigma work to minimize the number of defects, while TQM works to decrease inefficiencies.
3. Lean Manufacturing
Lean manufacturing depends on the Toyota Production System first developed for the Toyota Company. It’s described as encompassing all aspects of the business and is used in the final product’s design, development, creation, and marketing. Lean manufacturing also provides guidelines on support and management activities such as quality assurance and monitoring, human resource management and accounting practices. The following are some of the problems that lean methodology aims to solve:
- Imbalanced production quantities
- Transport inefficiencies
- Production bottlenecks
- Inventory errors
- Product defects
- Wastage
Lean manufacturing maximizes all processes that add value and eliminates every step in its basic form. Therefore, it’s a practice of extreme corporate weight loss that’s had far-reaching consequences for virtually every modern industry — not just manufacturing.
4. Kaizen
Kaizen is a Japanese term that means continuous improvement, which explains its basis of gradual, continuous, and incremental improvement. It signifies change (kai) for the better (zen) in Japanese. Hence, it embodies the concept of continuous improvement through continuous, gradual, and incremental changes. In addition, it believes that small changes can leave behind a large-scale impact. Hence, it targets improving productivity and eliminating wastefulness at the smallest levels. Following are the different types of waste that kaizen aims to eliminate:
- Muda (wastefulness): Practices that consume resources while adding no value
- Mura (unevenness): Overproduction leaves behind waste, like an excess product
- Muri (overburden): An excessive amount of strain on resources, such as worn-out machinery or overworked employees
It also emphasizes maintaining cordial employee-manager relationships to create harmony, from assembly-line workers to the C-suite. This way also completes a feedback loop that improves the business process.
5. Plan Do Check Act (PDCA)
The PDCA cycle is an interactive form of problem-solving. It’s used to enhance processes and implement change. PDCA was introduced by Walter Shewhart when he applied the scientific approach to economic quality control. Later, the concept was developed even further by W. Edwards Deming, who expanded on Shewhart’s concept and used the scientific approach for process improvement and quality control. There are four basic steps to the PDCA cycle. Each step of the PDCA cycle carries out the following role:
- Plan: Identify the problem area, analyze it, and find an appropriate solution
- Do: Test and implement the plan on a small scale
- Check: Analyze the effect of the solution and measure the difference
- Act: After reviewing the test results, decide whether or not you want to implement the change at a larger scale. Implement the solution permanently
The PDCA cycle continues in repetition and supports the theory of continuous improvement, continuous change, and continuous feedback. This implies that these steps can be repeated until your team reaches the desired result.
6. 5 Whys Analysis
The 5 Whys analysis is a process improvement method used to identify the root cause. Toyota developed this method to develop a problem-solving mindset. The Five Whys analysis, often known as the root cause analysis, is one of the seven fundamentals used in six sigma. The principle idea behind the tool is that there is a cause for every effect. Therefore, the quality issue can be viewed as having multiple causes.
The primary advantage of the Five Whys is that it is one of the most powerful assessment methods of all non-statistical analyses. It can uncover and trace back to problems that were not obvious. When applying the 5 Whys technique, you need to get to the problem’s essence and fix it. The 5 Whys may demonstrate to you that the source of the problem is quite unexpected. Often, issues considered a technical problem turns out to be human and process issues. Therefore finding and eliminating the root cause is crucial to avoid iteration of failures.
7. Business Process Management (BPM)
Business process management (BPM) is analyzing and improving business processes. Your team implements processes that work when your team is small, but as you develop, those processes may not scale in a way that permits your team to be as efficient as possible. Moreover, BPM often helps teams identify bottlenecks, ways to automate manual work, and strategies to enhance inefficiencies. Following are five fundamental steps to business process management.
- Analyze: Examine your current processes and map them from starting to end. This is commonly known as process mapping
- Model: Redesign the business process to incorporate the change
- Implement: During this stage, it’s important to establish key success metrics so you can gauge whether or not the changes made were successful
- Monitor: Measure the Key performance indicators (KPIs) and compare them to the previous metrics
- Optimize: Use the data and the test process to develop business functions
However, to reap the benefits of BPM, one would require a business process management system that can keep track of continuous monitoring and implementation of the many processes.
Next, in this six sigma awareness blog, we’ll discuss the DMAIC model.
The DMAIC Model
The DMAIC model is a blueprint for six sigma, used to improve the company processes’ quality of results. DMAIC stands for: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. These are the fundamental phases that each project must go through to find the right solution. The objective of the DMAIC approach is to bring structure to problem-solving. When organizations consistently use the model, employees better address process issues and find an effective solution. Cross-functional collaboration is developed, and change becomes easier to control. In addition, teams can utilize DMAIC to implement a new process or improve an existing process. Now, let’s take a deep look into each of the five steps of the DMAIC model.
1. Define
In the first phase of the DMAIC methodology, the project team better defines the problem given by leadership, asking internal and external customers questions to affirm that the issue exists. The critical steps during the define phase are:
- Identify the opportunity for improvement
- Delineate the scope of the project
- Develop customer requirements
- Estimate project impact
- Identify all stakeholders
- Form the team
2. Measure
During this phase, the project team begins examining the current baseline performance of the problem, collecting and interpreting the relevant data on current performance. Following are the main goals of this phase:
- Develop the data collection techniques to be used to measure success
- Determine input, processes, and output indicators
- Collect and assess current state data
- Write a summary on the failure modes and effects analysis
- Implement process capability analysis
The use of visual management tools like control charts, bar charts, run charts, etc. can help you achieve better results at this stage.
3. Analyze
Analyze is the third phase of the DMAIC methodology. During this phase, the project team collects and utilizes data to prove theories of the root cause or causes of the problem. Moreover, the Analyze phase targets identifying and testing the root causes of problems and focusing on improvement. In conclusion, the critical steps at this stage include:
- Create a problem statement
- Perform a root cause analysis
- Implement process control
- Design measurable improvement experiments
- Develop a plan for better improvement
Many firms use value stream mapping and the 5 Whys problem-solving technique during this stage.
4. Improve
The objective of the improvement phase is to identify a wide range of potential solutions before identifying the critical solutions which will give us the maximum return for our investment and directly fix the root cause we identified. This stage includes the following activities:
- Brainstorm and put forth solution ideas
- Develop a design of experiments (DOE) to identify the expected benefits of a solution
- Revise process maps and designs according to the data collected in the previous stage
- Plan and outline a test solution
- Implement Kaizen events to develop the process
- Inform all stakeholders about the solution
The use of improvement management software is beneficial at this stage. In addition, this helps move the process seamlessly, accomplish cross-functional collaboration, and simplify the management and executives to follow a given DMAIC project.
5. Control
It is the fifth stage of the DMAIC model. It’s time to put the process under control to ensure its long-term efficacy when the modifications are in place and successfully handle the difficulties to improve your operations. This is the phase at which you’ll:
- Determine and record the new work standard
- Create a quality control plan to guarantee that everyone in the team is using the same methodologies and measurements
- Confirm that the targeted cause is causing fewer failures
- Use Statistical Process Control (SPC) to monitor process execution and identify any issues that arise
- Determine if any additional adjustments are required to satisfy the process’s goals
- Using the “Five S” of lean, streamline process improvements
- Integrate, document, and share what you’ve learned
After the Control phase, you can quantify the complete impact of process changes in cost reduction, efficiency, quality improvement, productivity increase, and customer satisfaction.
Next will see the application of lean six sigma to services and information technology.
Application of Lean Six Sigma to Services and Information Technology
Application of Lean Six Sigma to the Service Sector
Service management experts can use lean six sigma quality management strategies to minimize tasks that offer no value to consumers, reduce costs, eliminate defects, reduce variations, and make data-driven decisions. By lowering the complexity of service delivery, you can save money, time, and waste. Moreover, you can achieve important quality criteria by reducing variation. Choose and prioritize projects and processes that can benefit from lean six sigma methodologies to generate a return on investment without requiring more resources. Then, you can define, measure, analyze, improve and control processes to solve issues in service delivery.
Research shows that service organizations incur the cost of poor quality. It may be as high as 50% of the budget in some instances. In addition, analysis reveals that less than 10% of process cycle time is “productive work.” The remaining is waste, rework, and other non-value-added activities. Following are some of the applications of service sectors that use lean six sigma:
1. Financial Services
Work in progress causes detains in-service completion. By analyzing and improving financial service processes, including loan applications, banking institutions reduce unanswered telephone calls, email messages, and incomplete reports. Processes that take ages to complete result in lower customer satisfaction rates. In addition, banking service professionals analyze their processes to eliminate any step that provides no value to the customer. This usually improves customer loyalty. To sum up, customers might pay for additional services if they reduce the valuable time required to complete processes, like transferring money online or applying for a credit card.
2. Health Care Services
Hospitals, physicians, and nurses can save expenses, improve survival rates, and attract new contracts and patients by reviewing systems and eliminating superfluous stages. By conducting postoperative surveys, you can check that services fulfill the customer’s needs or needs that cannot be met with current services. Moreover, you may focus on the key services by deleting extraneous options. Above all, you can find new services for your health care practice by examining services offered at a competitor’s clinic or hospital.
3. Aerospace Services
Aerospace companies form mergers and consolidations that may lack consistent service processes. The Aerospace quality management professionals can streamline standardized processes by applying lean six sigma techniques. You may reduce lead times by ensuring that each step in the process builds on the prior one. Controlling activities, such as airplane maintenance, allows you to prioritize the work that must be done first and perform related jobs simultaneously to make the most efficient use of resources. In addition, effective quality management personnel for service delivery analyze processes to identify delays and remove steps that slow the process down. You can identify unnecessary processes in a process, such as replacing an engine, by mapping the steps.
4. Municipal Services
By analyzing procedures and applying lean six sigma quality management processes, city departments can improve their citizens’ services. For example, reducing the time it takes to complete a process, such as obtaining a construction permit, promotes corporations to do business with the city. In addition, by eliminating unnecessary steps in services, such as garbage collection or snow elimination, you can speed up processes, improve quality and decrease complexity and costs.
Application of Lean Six Sigma to Information Technology
Information Technology (IT) refers to anything related to computing technology, including networking, hardware, software, the Internet, or the people connected with these technologies. Globally, all companies have IT departments to manage their businesses’ computers, networks, and other technical areas. Historically, six sigma implementation into their regular operations had proved fruitful for companies because the strength of six sigma lies in the data-driven approach; hence it has supported minimizing the project duration. With the inclusion and certification of the six sigma framework, professionals can face challenges towards better solutions for tomorrow. In addition, it is a defect reduction methodology that transforms organizations to focus on the quality of the customer experience.
Despite its origin in manufacturing, when implemented in IT, six sigma isn’t about widgets; the focus is still on processes. When applied to IT operations, six sigma targets measuring and improving internal processes, like network speed and reliability, and line-of-business activities in which IT plays a role, such as how well an online ordering system is working or how well your customer support system is functioning actually.
Many big companies, such as Honeywell and Textron, have their own internal ‘brands’ of six sigma tailored to their line of business and frequently combined with Lean, another manufacturing technique designed to weed out non-value-adding sub-processes. Other companies fine-tune the DMAIC model as needed. Chase Financial, for example, added a stage called ‘implement.’
Case Study:
Based in Bangalore, India, Wipro is one of the world’s largest IT services and product engineering companies. It employs over 100,000 people and operates 70 delivery facilities in 55 countries. Moreover, Wipro, an Indian IT behemoth, has decoded and polished Lean techniques for its Global IT Consulting services. Other firms, such as TCS, Infosys, and HCL, quickly followed successful deployments. The following are some of the advantages of using Lean Six Sigma in your IT process:
- Improve the business and IT processes’ efficiency and effectiveness
- Improve customer experience while lowering overall operating expenses
- Deliver faster results with business value
- Boost employee productivity
- Enhance the quality of product and service performance.
- Enable service capability and stability with operational efficiency and control
The bottom line is that Lean Six Sigma, in conjunction with Project Management, can be successfully applied to IT projects, automated IT processes, ERP decisions/implementation, data warehousing, software design, user interface design, and customer support operations in a variety of IT companies, BPOs, KPOs, and other organizations.
Integration of Lean Six Sigma With Other Process Improvement Frameworks and Lifecycles – Six Sigma Awareness
Many software organizations are beginning to use Six Sigma and find that they need to rationalize its relationship to the standard software development cycle process. Many issues and alternatives arise when addressing this need. Therefore, the lean manufacturing and six sigma approaches are increasingly being used in tandem, and the result is what we have today: a collaborative effort between the two. Companies have realized that combining the strengths of both methods allows them to use both strategies’ strengths, resulting in a comprehensive and successful strategy that can solve various challenges linked to process and product improvement.
Lean manufacturing emphasizes routine management, process standardization, and the analysis of timings and motions to remove waste. In addition, six sigma, finding the core cause of an issue necessitates deeper investigation and analysis. They both can be considered valuable techniques for integrating company management systems of improvement, innovation, and regular management.
Lean and Six Sigma
Lean is a systematic method of reducing or eliminating non-value-adding operations from a process. Moreover, it stresses eliminating superfluous processes in a process and focusing on the only steps that offer value. Above all, the lean technique ensures high quality and customer satisfaction. It aids in:
- Reducing process cycle time
- Improving product or service delivery time
- Reducing or eliminating the chance of defect generation
- Reducing the inventory levels
- Optimizing resources for key improvements among others
It’s a never-ending approach to waste elimination that promotes a never-ending cycle of progress.
Six Sigma is a data-driven problem-solving methodology. The emphasis is on process variations, with a focus on client happiness. In other words, this strategy aims for continuous process improvement with few faults. In addition, six sigma seeks to make a process defect-free at a rate of 99.99996 percent. As a result, a six sigma process results in 3.4 failures per million opportunities or less.
Six Sigma and Agile
More companies are using Six Sigma and Agile approaches in their business. This is because six sigma and Agile allow companies to combat the pressures and demands of the consumer market and even excel in their industries. But these two methodologies are distinct in their goals and implementation.
Six Sigma is a structured methodology for improving processes and solving problems. Therefore, it provides a comprehensive set of tools, strategies, and roadmaps to reduce variance, improve the quality of manufacturing processes by reducing defects, and increase the capabilities of processes, goods, and services. The focus of six sigma is to control variation and reduce defects. Hence, this entails getting to the root cause of problems and eliminating quality issues. In addition, by ensuring consistency and quality, six sigma companies can achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction.
Agile is a philosophy that advocates revolutionary change for software development. It is not a methodology but a set of values and principles that guide software development teams to do their work. Agile emphasizes collaboration, customer engagement, and responding to change compared to rigorous process implementation, documentation, and planning that non-Agile approaches, like Waterfall, are known for. In addition, various methodologies subscribe to the principles and values of Agile. Above all, Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, and Adaptive Software Development (ASD) are more widely applied.
Now, let us go through the next topic: Key success factors for lean six sigma implementation.
Key Success Factors for Lean Six Sigma Implementation
Lean Six Sigma mainly concentrates on the root cause analysis & Lean focuses on speed waste elimination. Combining lean & six sigma gives us the best of the two methodologies. Thus, these methodologies provide the desired results. So, combining these two processes & implementing these methodologies within an organizational structure thus results in process improvements, waste reduction & effective monitoring, which would eventually increase the profit margins. Following are some of the key success factors for the implementation of lean six sigma:
1. Committed Leadership
Successful lean six sigma implementation is dependent on the commitment of leaders within an organization. Therefore, an efficient project leader plays an important role in the success of any project. Most importantly, it is the responsibility of the project leaders to prioritize all business activities in the right structure. Furthermore, they have to ensure that all the resources are available to the team to start the production process.
2. Train the Workforce
All the individuals should have complete knowledge about the project and the tools required for completing the project successfully. Hence, proper training sessions must be conducted for the organization’s employees. So, training should distribute throughout an organization and deliver to suit individual needs. Moreover, training courses should be based on individuals’ skills to learn about their jobs and lean six sigma tools and techniques.
3. Allocate Right Resources & Share the Gains
It becomes very important for the project managers to apply the right members in the project team. Their jobs become simple if the team members are already six sigma certified. In addition, it helps the project managers easily assign them to monitor the project development process. They are already knowledgeable with all the tools & techniques of lean six sigma. It recommends having a ‘pull system’ because everything should be available when needed. It also recommends using it in conjunction with lean six sigma’s other tools to get better results. Finally, it says that allocating resources will help ensure they are used effectively.
4. Project Plan & Approach
A project manager needs to review the project status at regular time intervals. Therefore, this should be possible by conducting regular team meetings with stakeholders & senior management team. Moreover, the feedback and suggestions must be shared with every individual associated with the project.
5. Use Lean Six Sigma Tools & Techniques
All the procedures must document properly, which will provide the organization with precise information about the economic effect, which creates post-implementation of lean six sigma methodologies. Hence, a project manager’s ability to accurately assess and report the financial impact of each six sigma project becomes critical.
Lean manufacturing depends on the Toyota Production System, which was initially developed for Toyota. TFS Digital is driving this digital transformation by pioneering the “Software Production System,” which combines the power of our Toyota Production System implemented in our global manufacturing facilities with the discipline of agile scrum methodologies. It encompasses all aspects of the business and is applied to the final product’s design, development, creation, and marketing. Lean manufacturing also provides guidelines for support and management functions, such as quality assurance and monitoring, human resource management, and accounting practices.
Six Sigma Awareness – Conclusion
Many organizations worldwide are opting for six sigma to gain a competitive edge, improve their processes, reduce cost, solve organizational problems and develop a skill base to sustain improvement over a longer period. Implementing the concepts of six sigma helps to increase productivity and lower costs at the same time by increasing the focus on the usage of statistical tools and techniques. Also, Six Sigma Awareness helps to gain a fundamental understanding of globally accepted quality management methodology. In addition, these skills provide a greater understanding of business processes.
In conclusion, to learn more about six sigma and six sigma awareness, individuals and enterprise teams need to get trained in six sigma awareness certification training today. Moreover, many benefits derive from getting a six sigma awareness certification. So, if you’re looking to touch new career heights, Invensis Learning will help you achieve your dream. Invensis Learning is one of the world’s leading and best professional certification training providers.
