Six Sigma in the service sector and small organization.
Because Six Sigma was first developed in the manufacturing sector, and most its publicity and promotion has revolved around companies such as Motorola and GE, many people in the service sector think that Six Sigma does not apply to their organization. Nothing can be further from the truth. The characteristics of six sigma are present in all business processes; thus Six Sigma can easily be applied to a wide variety of business environments including the service areas. General Electric was one of the early organizations that understood that Six Sigma could be applied to any process that created defects and introduced Six Sigma in GE financial. In fact, it is generally agreed that 50 percent or more of the total savings opportunity in an organization lies outside of manufacturing. Within the service sector, Six Sigma is beginning to be called transactional Six Sigma.
However, while Six Sigma applies equally well in service areas, it is true that services have some unique characteristics relative to manufacturing processes. First, the culture is less scientific and service employees do not think in terms of processes, measurements, and data. The processes are often invisible, complex, and not well defined or well documented. Also, the work requires considerable human intervention, such as customer interaction, under writing or approval decisions, or manual report generation. These differences make opportunities difficult to identify and projects difficult to define. Finally, similar service activities are often done in different ways. If you have three people doing the same job, perhaps in three different locations, it is unlikely that they will do the job in the same way.
Because service processes are largely people driven, measurements are often nonexistent or ill defined, because many believe that defects cannot be measured. Therefore, one must create measurement systems before collecting any data. Applying Six Sigma to services requires examination of four key measures of the performance:
Mohamed Hassan is an independent IT and Project Management consultant in the Bay Area, CA. He enjoys reading and writing and believes that there is nothing called Perfect Knowledge nor I know it all. Perfection is an endeavor that we must have as a life’s quest. In our quest to become better human, we must at all times be prepared to accept our fate. Mohamed can be reached at http://www.netarco.com
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