Six Sigma Certification - Will It Really Benefit Your Organization?
The success of Six Sigma certification and implementation depends on many factors. It requires nothing less than a relentless effort and dedication to see that it succeeds. Although specific procedures may be in place, an equal responsibility lies on upper management to dedicate their 100% of their time and resources to this mammoth task. The top and bottom ends of your business, and all those in between, need to come together with single minded contributions to make Six Sigma certification and implementation successful.
Six Sigma Certification Benefits To Your Business ? An Overview
You need to realize that, before the real implementation begins with Six Sigma methodology, the groundwork needs to be laid. Depending on the size and culture of your business, your team needs to have a brainstorming session, with key focus on potential benefits and consequences of having your employees attain Six Sigma certification. As the employer, you need to sponsor your employees in their Six Sigma training efforts. The decision to go for Six Sigma certification is nothing less than a dollars and cents decision.
Benefits To Your Business
Six Sigma certification benefits are both tangible and intangible. Intangible benefits can be in the form of customer loyalty that will follow the life of your business. Below we examine some of the benefits of Six Sigma certification.
1.Increase In Your Bottom Line: Six Sigma certification results in improved processes, better utilization of resources like finances, time and materials and reduction in the cost of production. On the customer side, there is higher satisfaction with products/services. This improves your bottom line substantially.
2.Six Sigma Certification Increases Shareholder Value: Fundamentally, this results from increased revenues, but in addition to this, there is increased customer loyalty and confidence that raises the stock values as well as the value to shareholders (to whom you are responsible).
3.Total Customer Satisfaction: Customers get more than what they asked for on the product/service side, at a lower price or higher value.
4.Decreased Employee Attrition: Six Sigma training boosts employee morale due to a reduced workload. Six Sigma certified employees realize the positive returns of quality work, which keeps them motivated. This reduces employee turnover and burnout.
5.Six Sigma Certification Creates A Win-Win Situation For The Supply Chain: In converting supplier-customer relationships to long-term partnerships, both parties win. Six Sigma training and certification accelerates this process with its focus on quality; prices come down and both the product quality and life cycle time improve.
There are arguments raging over efficacy of Six Sigma in all aspects of business processes. Take, for example, the case of billing your customers. If the process is fundamentally defective, where Six Sigma fails to take a strategic and holistic approach without focusing on the flaws inherent in the system itself, Six Sigma's outstanding abilities to unearth root causes of inefficiency can't be questioned. It deploys analytical and statistical tools to expose flaws in the execution, albeit without questioning whether the process itself is riddled with defects.
Kenneth S. Stephens, a retired professor of quality management, in the Southern College of Technology, has a different viewpoint. Different quality management tools such as TQM and Six Sigma are not very different conceptually except for their labels. Managers and corporations tend use the same statistical confounded philosophy, albeit with different labels. What described the whole sphere of statistical phenomenon coupled with some of the brilliant managerial, engineering and other procedures put together has later emerged as Six Sigma.
The Limited Success Of Six Sigma
Since its famous emergence after the Motorola implementation, Six Sigma has been more or less popular with large companies where conflicting situations exist on the processing front with big ROI potential as opposed to that of small and medium businesses. The potential ROI in small and medium companies will be invariably smaller relative to the cost of Six Sigma implementation. The processes are also simpler which makes sense.
Looking at these factors, it becomes very difficult to differentiate between various quality management tools like TQM, Six Sigma and Kaizen Events where all of them share most of the basic principles, whereas as the scope, time frame and talent base remain same as mandated across the disciplines.
Furthermore, there are other supporting arguments to the theory that the training that the Black Belts receive is not quite up to the mark. After the training, the Black Belt needs to be able to successfully meet the management needs of the Six Sigma team. Unless candidates have a lot of experience with creditable accomplishments and leadership, the cost justification of the implementation suffers.
Future of Six Sigma
As is common knowledge, Six Sigma shares many fundamental principles and tools with other quality techniques, which leads us back to the thought that the emergence of Six Sigma was only psychologically satisfying to upper management. All programs with different labels have met similar successes or failures as had Six Sigma. What is more, there is no denying the argument that even Six Sigma would have possibly met the same fate as other techniques, all conditions being equal.
Alternately, Kaizen may be thought of for smaller implementations and especially in situations where the problem sources are not very complicated. And Six Sigma can enjoy its place under the sun, for larger projects where the problems are far more complex and the root causes are not clearly understood prior to deployment.
Tony Jacowski has sinced written about articles on various topics from University, Six Sigma and Information Technology. Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions ? Six Sigma Online offers online and certification classes for lean six sig. Tony Jacowski's top article generates over 90500 views. to your Favourites.