Six Sigma, a tool applied and invented by Robert W. Galvin and Bill Smith, at Motorola in mid 1980 and was to attack variation and ultimately to reduce defects. This technique not only gave Motorola an increase in business but also more customer confidence. This tool was then, also applied by many world-class companies such as General Electric, IBM, Honeywell, Texas Instruments, Johnson & Johnson, DEC, and they shown tremendous results from Six Sigma Implementation. Ultimately this tool was widely accepted by world manufacturing and later on being used by, Sales, Marketing, Design, Administration and Service Industries also.
Six Sigma is a philosophy of reducing defects up to 3.4 from one million opportunities, which means almost reaching perfection. By applying Six Sigma, one company can achieve following benefits:
• Reduction in cost • Reduction in waste • Reduction in product/Service delivery time • Improvement in Productivity • Growth in Market-share • Retention of Customer • Reduction in Cycle-time • Reduction in Defects • Cultural change • Development of Product/service
Six Sigma is not a one-day solution, but it is a long-term strategy. To apply Six Sigma in any organization, it needs that people should be properly trained. To get full benefits from Six Sigma implementation, need arises to put some investment in training and development, infrastructure development and culture change. One thing most important is that, tangible benefits can be measured easily in terms of financial growth but not intangible benefits like customer satisfaction, customer loyalty etc. When talking about Six Sigma financial benefits, Motorola from 1986-2001 has generated revenue of about 356.9 B$ and saved about 16 B$. Similarly in 1998, Allied Signal done business of 15.1B$ and net saving was 0.5B$. From 1996-1999 GE has net saving of 382.1 B$ and they from Six Sigma implementation, saved 4.4 B$. Honey well earned revenue of 72.3 B$ from 1998-2000 and saved 1.8 B$ from Six sigma Implementation.
Six Sigma was originally designed for only manufacturing industries. Main purpose was to focus on product input variations and to control them within the prescribed limits. Also focus was to measure human error and equipment error through Gauge R&R studies, and ultimate goal was to manufacture good quality products with minimum possible defects.
Then this tool was also applied in different service organizations such as Health Care, Banking, Ticketing, Postal services and Hotels. Main focus was to provide error free service to valuable customers. In Health care it is being effectively utilized to control medical reports errors, surgical operations errors, wrong medicine errors and so on. In banking, it is being used to minimize wrong financial transactions and wrong billings. In ticketing of airlines, it is being used to reduce errors in wrong flight bookings. In postal services, it is being effectively utilized to minimize wrong delivery of mail and also late delivery of mails. In hotels, its use is to control wrong delivery of order and bills to other customers.
Six Sigma has changed the way of doing business. It is helping organizations to minimize unnecessary delays, improving productivity and wining more customer confidence.
http://www.AWSurveys.com/HomeMain.cfm?RefID=vinaypandit
