Business Week's recent article, "Six Sigma: So Yesterday?" posits the Six Sigma revolution has passed. In today's innovation economy, the article argued, blasting Six Sigma into every nook and cranny/pocket of resistance is the wrong strategy. According to Babson College management professor Tom Davenport. "Process management is a good thing. But I think it always has to be leavened a bit with a focus on innovation and [customer relationships]."
While Six Sigma (originated at Motorola) was developed as a systematic way to improve quality, the reason it caught fire has been its effectiveness in cutting costs and improving short-term profitability. But as many have observed, you cannot cost-cut your way to greatness. The chickens of "flash performance" will always come home to roost.
Six Sigma's DMAIC Model (for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) is an effective performance improvement model, no doubt.
So what's wrong with Six Sigma and how can it be transformed into a more robust optimization tool?
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2 comments:
IMO six sigma is not dead or redundant. It is a technicque that has a predominantly single view of process efficiency/effectiveness, that is to say it concentrates on defect identification and elimination. It makes sense to do a bit of joined up thinking and to use sigma six with other similar techniques (lean or ABC for example) to give a multi faceted and balanced view of how god a process is.
We need to remember, Six Sigma is a tool-set first and foremost, designed to methodically identify areas for improvement and then improve those areas. The concepts of identifying where processes, or product spec's, etc are not repeatible, or reliable are solid, and should be used at all times, whether you need a full DMAIC (or other) structure to execute.
THE PROBLEM today is, Six Sigma has taken on a life of its own in most large corporations; becoming another 'beast' so to speak that has no real direction anymore. Get Six Sigma out of the conference room and back into core engineering (Quality, Industrial, Design, Test) where it belongs.
Some reading this blog know my history and know I cannot leave the subject without a sentence on "lean". Lean Concepts should always be practiced as well, executing (Plan/Do/Study/Act) (or Kiazen) events consistently. "Lean" removes WASTE, and today's corporations Six Sigma programs introduce a huge WASTE block in the value stream. Not good...
Both tool-sets are powerful and a must!
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