Winning - Jack Welch [86]
Here goes:
Six Sigma is a quality program that, when all is said and done, improves your customers’ experience, lowers your costs, and builds better leaders.
Six Sigma accomplishes that by reducing waste and inefficiency and by designing a company’s products and internal processes so that customers get what they want, when they want it, and when you promised it. Obviously, you want to make your customers more satisfied than your competitors do, whether you run Upper Crust Pizza or manufacture the most powerful jet engines. In the strategy chapter we talked about customer loyalty, and we used the word sticky to describe what you want. Well, a huge part of making your customers sticky is meeting or exceeding their expectations, which is exactly what Six Sigma helps you do.
One thing that is sure to kill stickiness is inconsistency in services or products.
Consider this hypothetical. You make spare parts and promise ten-day delivery.
Over the course of three deliveries, your customers receive their parts on day five, day ten, and day fifteen. On average, ten-day delivery.
Over the course of the next three deliveries, they receive their parts on day two, day seven, and day twelve. An average of seven days, a seemingly big improvement in the customer experience. But not really—you might have had some internal process or cost improvements, but the customer has experienced nothing but inconsistency!
With Six Sigma, your customers would receive all three of their deliveries on day ten, or in the worst case, on day nine, day ten, and day eleven.
Six Sigma, in other words, is not about averages. It’s about variation and removing it from your customer’s interface with you.
To remove variation, Six Sigma requires companies to unpick their entire supply and distribution chains and the design of their products. The objective is to wash out anything that might cause waste, inefficiency, or a customer to get annoyed with your unpredictability.
So, that’s Six Sigma—the elimination of unpleasant surprises and broken promises.
SIMPLE, COMPLEX, OR NOT AT ALL
From 20,000 feet, Six Sigma has two primary applications. First, it can be used to remove the variation in routine, relatively simple, repetitive tasks—activities that happen over and over again. And second, it can be used to make sure large, complex projects go right the first time.
Examples of the first kind of application are a multitude. Call centers from South Dakota to Delhi use Six Sigma to make sure the phone is answered after the same number of rings for each incoming inquiry. Credit card processing facilities use it to make sure people receive accurate bills on the same day every month.
The second application of Six Sigma is the territory of engineers and scientists involved in multipart endeavors that sometimes take years to complete. If you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a new jet engine or a gas turbine, you cannot afford to figure out process or design inconsistencies late in the game. Six Sigma is incredibly effective in discovering them on the drawing board, i.e., the computer screen.
Obviously, the amount of Six Sigma training and education required depends on where and how you intend to apply it.
For the first application—simple, repetitive activities—the level of training and education is certainly manageable. In order to discover the root causes of inconsistencies, people need to know what kind of information to gather and how to analyze it. The rigor of this type of training has a terrific side effect. It builds critical thinking and discipline. That’s one reason why we noticed that every time a business