The three keys to Six Sigma success

by Minitab on 3rd October 2008

provided by

Minitab

Following a survey of nearly 200 Six Sigma practitioners, Minitab identifies three key principles for project success, and shows how its own Quality Companion software can help.

Introduction

Let’s say you’re leading a Six Sigma project. You find it exciting and challenging, even a little stressful. Your company has invested a great deal of time, effort, and money in its Six Sigma program. Expectations for your project are high: challenge the status quo, transform the process, and boost the bottom line.

Naturally, you ask yourself, "How can I make sure my Six Sigma project will be successful?" Ask 10 experienced Six Sigma practitioners that same question and you’re likely to get 10 different answers. But, what would happen if you asked that question of 100 practitioners? 200? Would common themes emerge? Would some concepts predominate? Could you and your company capitalize on them?

Minitab surveyed nearly 200 Six Sigma practitioners at all skill levels from major companies across the U.S. and discovered three key principles for Six Sigma project success:

Pick the right project
Get good management support
Execute the DMAIC method

This Pareto chart shows 80% of the survey responses was concentrated in these three categories. The remaining 20% was distributed among 36 other success factors.

Figure 1

This document explores these three principles and demonstrates how the unique capabilities of Quality Companion by Minitab® and its essential utility, the Quality Companion Dashboard, can help you select projects that are appropriate for the DMAIC method and secure valuable leadership support.

Pick the Right Project

The widely publicized, million-dollar savings of Motorola, Xerox, and General Electric might lead a newly trained Six Sigma practitioner—from Green Belt to Champion—to believe that implementing Six Sigma is a guarantee of success. However, experienced Six Sigma team members tell a different story. They know first-hand that selecting the right project is a critical, early step to success.

Figure 2

What is the right project? The survey results above indicate that a project’s connection to finances–to a company’s bottom line–is a very important factor in the equation. When you can effectively establish and communicate a project’s favorable impact on company profits, you help reinforce its potential benefits.

Analyzing financial information is an important step to take early in a Six Sigma project.

Figure 3

In Quality Companion, a Project Financial Analysis can help you quickly estimate your gross pre-project savings and report your final figures once you’ve implemented a solution.

You can add and delete rows of data depending upon reporting expectations and then save those changes as a standard template.

A second factor is the size and focus of your project. The expectation of tremendous gains from Six Sigma often leads to initiating projects too large in scope to be manageable. Of the Master Black Belts surveyed, many warned about projects with a scope equivalent to ―boiling the ocean‖. The truly successful project is large enough to significantly improve the process, but still small enough to be manageable.

Figure 4

A SIPOC is a high-level process map that defines the scope of a process and helps identify potential projects by isolating areas that need improvement.

A SIPOC helps answer questions about where a process starts and ends, its major steps, primary inputs and outputs as well as the key internal and external customers and suppliers.

A SIPOC also helps identify whether the project’s objectives will require too large a change to be achieved.