Soft Skills

Sustaining Six Sigma and Spreading The Success

Let's imagine that your initial Six Sigma projects have achieved their goals. Now what? Six Sigma is dedicated at making permanent changes to re-align your process through the implementation of metrics. It enables you to know what you can expect from your people and processes. By maintaining and controlling that performance, you keep the value and purpose of your Six Sigma efforts in the forefront of all your activities, both today and into the future. Six Sigma helps you identify what you don't know, indicates what you should know, and helps you reduce defects that cost time, money, opportunities, and customers. Will you achieve a six-sigma level of quality, only 3.4 million defects per million opportunities—99.9997 percent perfect? That's really not the question. The question is “How much are process variations and defects costing you?” If you don't have that knowledge, you don't have the power to reduce or eliminate those problems and achieve significant savings. This chapter is about how to follow-up on your first Six Sigma successes, how to build upon those results, how to keep the energy level high, and how to spread Six Sigma throughout the organisation and beyond.

Continue the conquests

As part of your Six Sigma commitment, you need to initiate new projects, find more dollars, raise your quality levels, and maintain the momentum of your initiative. While Six Sigma might be initiated from the top, it works because of the employees on the project teams. Thus, managers at all levels should be focused on this big question - “How can we keep employees energised on Six Sigma? “To get the best return on your investment and keep customers competitive and content, you need to move with the momentum and sustain the gain. After all, you don't make the investment in Six Sigma and take the time to train people, to select projects, and then to drill down to your costs of poor quality once. Six Sigma is ongoing; it's a constant, “living” methodology that needs to continue as long as your business does. After all, to quote Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Or, as an unknown philosopher has put it, “It's not a single, great, heroic deed that defines who you really are. It's the little things you do, day by day, that count.” It's helpful to break up the basic infrastructure required for successful Six Sigma into a two-year context. In the first year, you lay a foundation for success. In the second year, you follow up on your successful start and build on that foundation.

In the first year, you need to do the following:

• Train the best of the best for black belt projects
• Limit dropout rates to five percent or less
• Develop your ongoing project list to register projected and actual saving
• Set up your database to capture lessons learned
• Get green belt training under way
• Establish your ongoing communication plan, both externally and internally
• Break even within approximately eight months after the initial training
• Create compensation plans and progression plans for a full two years
• Develop a common metric and reporting/ review system that evaluates and updates the status of all projects monthly.
• Begin the backlog of projects and actively manage the reviews
• Establish process metrics and set baseline data into strategic plans for the next year
• Discover two to four master black belts upon the completion of training

In the second year, you need to do the following:

• Transition all training from your outside consultant to your own resources
• Have your internal master black belts train black belts
• Promote training such that ten percent of the people in your organisation become green belts
• Increase dollar savings by 300 percent over the first year's targets
• Engage your key suppliers in the Six Sigma methodology
• Build Six Sigma goals into companywide strategic plans
• Hold quarterly reviews with senior management
• Host certification events that reward and recognise black belt achievements
• Develop compensation/ incentive plans, not just for black belts and team members, but also for upper managers, to ensure continued support
• Get each black belt to work on four to six projects a year.
• Promote at least some of your black belts

Create a “pull” system for the Six Sigma initiative. Publicise the benefits so widely that there's more interest in becoming black belt than space in your classes.

Determine the next year's goals in the number of black belts, green belts, master black belts, project selection, and savings projections.

As you make progress with Six Sigma, all of these elements will become routine and obvious aspects of the overall scope. However, this is where it is most important to recognise that there's no room for complacency or easing off on Six Sigma projects— sustaining their gains is critical to the continual success of your initiative. All of the items listed point in one direction: Keep it focused, keep it moving forward, and keep it in the fore-front of everything you do.

Lessons learned

It's possible to contribute to sustaining the gains obtained through Six Sigma by knowledge transfer. An organisation's prosperity depends on being able to learn at a faster rate than its competitors and to transfer and apply that learning to its operations to sustain its competitive advantage. So it's crucial to build and maintain a database of “lessons learned”. That means documenting what you have learned and achieved with projects to date and then relying on and sharing that information. Once you have fixed something, you need to be able to share what you know about it. It's important to share the lessons far and wide, not only to tout your success, but also to address similar issues elsewhere in the organisation. There's not much value in eliminating defects and keeping it to yourself— knowledge transfer needs to happen continually, both inside and outside of the project at hand.

It's important to provide coaching and training to ensure that the members of the project team transfer their knowledge to others and share information throughout the Six Sigma phases. The difficult process of managing information during Six Sigma projects can be made easier through Web-based software applications that maximise knowledge transfer and access for all members of the design project team.

Not all knowledge transfer requires technology, however, because members of Six Sigma project team come from various areas of the organisation, they can spread the word and share the knowledge more widely, taking it back home into their functions and to their co-workers. Nobody keeps success a secret. Those who have learned and applied the approach and the tools are going to be sharing them.

Communication plan

A communication plan is essential for sharing lessons and sustaining your Six Sigma success. Whether it is press releases, monthly newsletters, company intranet updates, video presentations, or quarterly company meetings, you need to get the message out regularly and conspicuously to people inside and outside the organisation.

You can report on the progress of projects, itemise actual dollar savings to date, explain Six Sigma acronyms, or focus in on the key tools. What's essential is to keep getting the word out on the benefits of Six Sigma. As you know, all levels of personnel should be familiar with the basics of your Six Sigma mission, including terminology, roles, and metrics. This is to ensure that people can “link” between the big picture and actionable items in their different areas. Again it's all about communicating, in real terms, the powerful implications of each and every project.

Keep focused on the customers

Continue to focus on the customers. Keep getting input, using means:

• Customer complaints: Encourage them and review them regularly
• Surveys: Target specifically the new product or service
• Focus groups: Arrange sessions to discuss the new product or service
• One-on-one interviews
• Contextual inquiry: Test the product or service with the customers

Find better ways to get input— and ways to discover the customers' latent needs and expectations.

Six Sigma by Brue Howes. Tata McGraw-Hill