Quality Solutions Consult
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Abstract
The implementation process of Six Sigma has been very much “standardized” based on large companies from the United States. Introducing Six Sigma in a European company, requires changes to this “standard”. These changes relate to issues like leadership and people management, in particular with respect to the role of the Black Belt. Also the integration with existing structures and systems is vital.
Even bigger changes have to be made if we want to introduce Six Sigma in small and medium sized companies. We need to rethink the Six Sigma roles and responsibilities, adapt training programs, evaluate the number and type of projects the organisation can handle, look at ways of using outside help, etc.
This paper deals with the elements that each organisation has to think about when introducing and personalising Six Sigma. It contains practical tips and alternative ways for implementing the program in your company.
1. Introduction
Like all new methods, Six Sigma has been presented as a miracle cure to all possible company problems. If only life were that simple! There are no guarantees to success, it takes a lot more than just implementing Six Sigma. But this implementation in itself can already cause problems if we don’t take the characteristics of the organisation into account. Because Six Sigma was developed in the United States and applied in large organisations, implementing it in European small and medium sized companies requires important adaptations.
2. People Management and the Role and Importance of the Black Belt
As project leaders, Black Belts play an important role in the Six Sigma program. Becoming a Black Belt for a limited period of time (generally two to three years) has proven to be an important career move for many young people. Within Six Sigma, Black Belts are seen as the people who create the breakthroughs, so they get high praise and personal benefit from their work (individual financial extras, career opportunities, recognition). Especially in the beginning Black Belt candidates were selected among so called “high potentials” and were sometimes even promised managerial positions after their Black Belt assignment. It was also very common to look for candidates outside of the quality department. But both the selection procedure and the “hero” status of the Black Belt have some drawbacks.
- Promising promotion is nice as long as there are enough positions available at higher levels. It is impossible to keep on guaranteeing this, especially if a high rotation rate of Black Belts is used (short assignments).
- There is not much new in Six Sigma, certainly not in the technical aspects of it. Within quality departments there is a lot of knowledge available on these topics. Upgrading quality engineers to Six Sigma Black Belts could save a lot of money that is now spent in training newcomers to the field.
- There is a certain dissatisfaction amongst Quality professionals because they feel that they have been trying to do all the things the Black Belts do now, but never got the means (mainly time) and certainly never got the attention and the recognition of the current Black Belts.
- High individual rewards are not common in Europe and not well liked either.
To avoid these problems, there is a guiding principle: a job is a job is a job. Each and every job in an organisation is equally important and it’s everybody’s responsibility to do this job to the best of his or her ability. A Black Belt is trained to be a good project leader and he is paid to be a good project leader, nothing special about it.
People that are interested in the work a Black Belt does, can apply for the job and if they already possess a lot of the required knowledge, so much the better, we can save on training costs. Do not limit the time period for a Black Belt assignment. If someone likes the job very much and does it well, keep him in that position. After all, mastering the knowledge a Black Belt is supposed to know, requires some time.
3. Integrating Six Sigma with Existing Systems
Improvement projects are a part of the overall quality effort a company has to do to stay competitive. Six Sigma is one of the tools that can be useful when running improvement projects. It is important that we keep the limitations of Six Sigma in mind. It has to be integrated and work together with the existing systems. Do not introduce it as a miracle cure to all quality problems. People know there is no such thing as a miracle cure.
Very often there is already an improvement process and Six Sigma can help strengthen that. The increasing attention to the integration of Six Sigma with Lean Manufacturing [1] is a positive evolution in this respect. But many companies go even further than that, by using a special name for their own improvement process as an umbrella under which a set of tools are covered. They don’t do “Six Sigma”, they don’t do “Lean” or “ISO 9000″. They work on continual improvement, using the tool that is most suited to the purpose when needed.
In this way they don’t replace one system by a presumed better system but they build on existing systems and knowledge in a gradual and continuous way, keeping the good things of older systems and adding new insights and tools to them.
In Europe people tend to be pretty sceptical about “new” programs that promise to change the company to a heaven on earth. They have seen and heard it all before and they know that new programs will also bring new problems. It is important to show continuity in the strategy, or to say it with the words of Dr. Deming: “constancy of purpose” [2].
4. Does Size Matter in Six Sigma?
Many of my clients are small companies (less than 100 people) and they often complain that management systems are developed by and for big corporations. This is certainly true for Six Sigma where the investment and running cost is extremely high. According to all literature this is more than compensated by the financial benefits from the projects but one should be careful when applying this reasoning to smaller companies. There is a lot of benefit in scale! A project that reduces the cost of producing one item with 1 € brings an organisation that makes a million parts yearly one million €. But what if we only make 1 000 parts? The energy needed for the project is similar but the benefits will be a lot smaller.
It is important to be realistic about your expectations up front and it is equally important to look for ways to reduce the cost of the program, without losing its strength. Some ways of doing this were already described in the previous chapter. Give the people that already have a lot of knowledge on Six Sigma the time and space to apply the theory. Accept that complex problems require time to be solved and strive for a true solution: tackle causes, not symptoms. Add Six Sigma to existing systems, so you only need to provide the extra knowledge needed.
Making changes to the “standardised” Six Sigma structure and content, is not only cost effective, but it will also increase the chances of implementing Six Sigma successfully.
4.1 Changes in Six Sigma structure
The classical Six Sigma structure has several roles and responsibilities and table 1 gives an overview of this.
Table 1: Overview of Six Sigma roles and tasks
For a small organisation this is an extremely heavy structure. The level to which it can be simplified obviously depends on the size, type and complexity of the organisation. For companies with between 50 and 500 employees the following comments can be made:
- There is a small distance between top management and operators, generally no more than two or three levels. So the members of the management team should be able to take up the role of project champions.
- There is a rule that states that the number of Black Belts should be around 1% of the total population of the organisation. This should be treated as a maximum.
- Having a full time Master Black Belt is unrealistic. If questions arise with the application of a specific Six Sigma tool, look for help outside. You will get the knowledge and the support from experts at the moment you need it.
- For very small companies even the role of Black Belt could be outsourced.
- Limit the number of Green Belts and start with the people that will be involved in Black Belt projects.
- There is a limit to the amount of projects that an organisation can handle. If there is no follow-up, projects will simply die. There is everyday work to be done in an organisation as well, not just the running of projects.
Each organisation will have to take its own decisions regarding their Six Sigma structure. Based on the comments above we have created an overview with suggestions for Six Sigma structures in companies with 50, 100, 200 and 500 people: see table 2.
Figure 2: Proposal for a simplified Six Sigma structure in function of number of employees
4.2 Changes in Six Sigma content
There are some general comments that can help simplify the content of Six Sigma training:
- Do not emphasize the sigma scale of quality. It is based on absolutely nothing, is very difficult to understand and adds nothing to all the measures of quality that are already there and well known by quality practitioners.
- If most of your processes are transactional avoid a training filled with statistics. Your people will have difficulty in understanding it and most of it will never be applied anyway.
- Use graphical analysis methods as much as possible. Very often they give you all the information you need without any statistical calculations. This is especially true for Green Belt training.
- Have a look at some of the Shainin tools for quality improvement. They are intuitive, simple but powerful [3].
- Evaluate if a full training package is needed. If the company has a quality engineer it is very likely that he possesses all the knowledge needed or that only some topics need to be thought.
The Six Sigma Black Belt training programs are very extensive and contain numerous quality methods and techniques. One could argue if all of this is really necessary (see also [4] for a discussion on this topic). Certainly not all of these techniques are equally important and with a clever selection we can create a very complete and functional toolbox that can handle 95 % of the projects.
Table 3 shows an example of such a selection, compared to a more general program based on [4]. An even further simplification can be found in [5] where statistical tools are limited to Statistical Process Control (SPC) and capability.
Table 3: Reduced Black Belt training program
5. Conclusion
Do not adopt Six Sigma, adapt it to your needs and your organisation. Although the method was developed for large organisations, there are many ways in which it can be adapted to make it more suitable to smaller sized companies. These adaptations include: simplifying the Six Sigma structure, limiting the number of Black Belts and Green Belts, adequate use of external help, simplifying training programs using already available knowledge, etc.
When implementing Six Sigma, even in its most simplified form, integrate it with existing systems and do not treat Black Belts as heroes!
You must make sure however to keep the key strengths of Six Sigma: good project selection and sufficient time for the project leader and his team to solve a complex problem completely.
References
[1] George, M.L.,(2002), Lean Six Sigma. Combining Six Sigma Quality with Lean Speed, McGraw-Hill, New York.
[2] Deming, W.E. (1986), Out of the Crisis, MIT, Cambridge
[3] Hoerl, R.W., (2001), Six Sigma Black Belts: What do they need to know?, Journal of Quality Technology, Vol 33, No 4, 391-435
[4] Bhote K.R, Bhote A.K., (2000),World Class Quality Using Design of Experiments to make it happen, AMACOM, New York
[5] Jay Arthur, (2000), Six Sigma Simplified – Quantum improvement made easy, LifeStar, Denver.
Willy Vandenbrande is the founder and President of QS Consult, a European consulting agency that assists organizations in various aspects of Quality Management.
willy@qsconsult.be
