Pros and cons of Six Sigma: an academic perspective

I also feel that while Six Sigma will evolve in the forthcoming years, there are some core elements or principles within Six Sigma that will be maintained, irrespective of the “next big thing”.

One of the real dangers of Six Sigma is to do with the capability of black belts (the so-called technical experts) who tackle challenging projects in organisations. We cannot simply assume that all black belts are equally good and their capabilities vary enormously across industries (manufacturing or service), depending a great deal on the certifying body. Another danger is the attitude of many senior managers in organisations that Six Sigma is “an instant pudding” solving all their ever-lasting problems. I also believe that the Six Sigma toolkit will continue to add new tools, especially from other disciplines such as healthcare, finance, sales and marketing. Having a core set of tools and techniques is an advantage of Six Sigma that brings speed to fix problems and its ease of accessibility to black belts and green belts.

I would like to raise the point that Six Sigma does provide an effective means for deploying and implementing statistical thinking (Snee, 1990; 2002) which is based on the following three rudimentary principles:

1. All work occurs in a system of interconnected processes.
2. Variation exists in all processes.
3. Understanding and analysing the variation are keys to success.

Statistical thinking can also be defined as thought processes, which recognise that variation is all around us and present in everything we do. All work is a series of interconnected processes, and identifying, characterising, quantifying, controlling and reducing variation provide opportunities for improvement (Snee, 1990). The above principles of statistical thinking within Six Sigma are robust and therefore it is fair to say that Six Sigma will continue to grow in the forthcoming years. In other words, statistical thinking may be used to create a culture that should be deeply embedded in every employee within any organisation embarking on Six Sigma programs.

However the total package may change in the evolutionary process. It is important to remember that Six Sigma has a better record than total quality management (TQM) and business process re-engineering (BPR), since its inception in the mid-late 1980s. The ever-changing need to improve will no doubt create needs to improve the existing Six Sigma methodology and hence develop better products and provide better services in the future. As a final note, the author believes that companies implementing or contemplating embarking on Six Sigma programs should not view it as an advertising banner for promotional purposes.

Conclusion

Six Sigma as a powerful business strategy has been well recognised as an imperative for achieving and sustaining operational and service excellence. While the original focus of Six Sigma was on manufacturing, today it has been widely accepted in both service and transactional processes. This paper highlights the pros and cons of Six Sigma from the viewpoint of an academician. Although the total package may change as part of the evolutionary process, the core principles of Six Sigma will continue to grow in the future. Six Sigma has made a huge impact on industry and yet the academic community lags behind in its understanding of this powerful strategy. It will therefore be incumbent on academic fraternity to provide well-grounded theories to explain the phenomena of Six Sigma. In other words, Six Sigma lacks a theoretical underpinning and hence it is our responsibility as academicians to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of Six Sigma.

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List of papers showing the fundamentals of Six Sigma: what is Six Sigma (Hoerl, 1998; Breyfogle III, 1999; Harry and Schroeder, 1999), why do we need Six Sigma (Snee, 2000; Pande et al., 2001), what makes Six Sigma different from other quality initiatives (Pyzdek, 2001; Snee and Hoerl, 2003), Six Sigma deployment (Keller, 2001; Adams et al., 2003), critical success factors of Six Sigma implementation (Antony and Banuelas, 2002), Six Sigma project selection process (Snee, 2002) and organisational infrastructure required for implementing Six Sigma (Adams et al., 2003; Snee and Hoerl, 2003).

References

Adams, C., Gupta, P. and Wilson, C. (2003), Six Sigma Deployment, Butterworth-Heinemann, Burlington, MA.

Antony, J. and Ban˜ uelas, R. (2002), “Key ingredients for the effective implementation of Six Sigma program”, Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 6 No. 4, pp. 20-7.