Six Sigma Stacks Up

We could soon be listening to the swan song for extended warranties on music systems and HD TVs, back-to-base repairs for PCs and PDAs might be sent packing, and exorbitant fees from home-repairs on washing machines and refrigerators nothing more than a long-forgotten bank statement entry. At least that’s the message I get from a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking.

According to mechanical engineer C. Sudhahar of the Noorul Islam College of Engineering, in Tamil Nadu, India, and colleagues, manufacturers could make their products essentially defect-free if they were to apply the principles of “six-sigma” and use a little web 2.0 know-how to share knowledge across their organization.

Six Sigma is a set of manufacturing principles and practices first developed by Bill Smith at Motorola in the mid-1980s to help the company reduce defects from its products. Strictly speaking, in any manufacturing environment, there is always going to be a few rogue items, so “Six Sigma” more realistically refers to working within much tighter specifications than normal. The end result is that the approach leads to quality control with defect levels below 3.4 defects per million opportunities. If you’re producing 3.4 million products each year, then on an annual basis just one customer is going to buy a dud. To several significant figures, that’s a success rate of 99.99966%.

The success of the Six Sigma concept in business has motivated many companies such as Volvo, Whirlpool, Nokia Siemens, and many others, to adopt and implement it. However, Sudhahar and colleagues point out that currently Six-Sigma is just one of three fields that dominate how modern organizations operate together with Information Technology (IT), and Web Engineering (WE), but each of these three fields are not yet fully integrated. The researchers have now developed a working model, which they call Web-based Six Sigma (WSS), that unites this trinity.

WSS enables the integration of WE facilities with the Six Sigma concept and allows experts both from within and outside an organization to share knowledge and pursue a defect-free goal.

The Six-Sigma approach involves five phases - define, measure, analyze, improve, and control phase, the six refers to the level of defect reduction itself, not the phases. The result of applying this approach to a product are benefits not only in defect reduction, but also in cutting cycle times, overall manufacturing costs, grabbing a bigger market share, improving productivity and service, customer retention, and more profoundly a cultural change within the organization.

In WSS, web-based six-sigma, the ideas at each phase are received from both internal and external experts from across organizational and outside cultures. A designated ‘facilitator’ is bridges the gap between those implementing the system and top management with security and privacy guaranteed through password protection and data encryption. If the number of employees in an organization is insufficient for a Six Sigma team, then WSS can be used to garner ideas from external experts in addition to those within the organization very easily. Moreover, the gathering of knowledge from outside experts using the WSS can facilitate the receipt of unbiased suggestions. This can enhance the efficiency of meeting customer requirements.

“WSS makes the coordination of Six Sigma elements an easier task even if many experts participate in the WSS project,” the researchers say. They have demonstrated the model system with a working party from washing manufacturer Whirlpool with great success.

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